The article “Quality Measures for Data Visualization: A Case Study of Polish Wikipedia”, authored by our researchers, has been published in open access. The work focuses on analyzing the quality of data visualizations in the Polish edition of Wikipedia. The study draws on an extensive dataset of over one million articles, from which visual elements such as tables, charts, diagrams, and maps were extracted and classified.
The authors defined and applied more than 30 measures of data visualization quality, covering both aesthetic and functional criteria – from readability and accuracy of information presentation to adherence to established design best practices. The analyzed visualizations were enriched with additional metadata and semantic labels generated by a multimodal (language–vision) model, enabling a more comprehensive assessment of each visualization. Each visual element was assigned to one of 22 thematic categories, based on connections between Wikipedia articles and the semantic knowledge base Wikidata, providing a holistic view of the structure and diversity of Wikipedia’s visual layer.
This study represents the first comprehensive examination of the visual dimension of Wikipedia. Its findings offer valuable insights for information designers, science communicators, digital humanities researchers, and developers of tools supporting high-quality digital content. The proposed methodology is universal and can be used to evaluate and monitor the quality of visualizations not only across different language editions of Wikipedia, but also in a wide range of open knowledge repositories, where well-designed visual content plays a key role in effective communication.
The work was presented at the KES 2025 conference. Authors of the publication: Dr. Piotr Stolarski, Dr. Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.