Wikipedia talk:Collaboration to convert graphs to SVG

I'd like to see a rationale for any of the style guidelines.

In particular I don't agree with either of:

• Avoid colour as much as possible. The graph should still be useable when printed then photocopied.
• Try to use the smallest discernible difference – e.g., clearly different shades of grey are better than red, green, and blue.

Since SVG can include media-specific CSS stylesheets, printable versions of graphs can be tailored to that medium. I don't know how MediaWiki implements SVG rasterisation but there's no reason it couldn't support that in the future.

It's particularly contradictory to juxtapose a point about accessibility for print with a point which is contrary to accessibility: people with poor eyesight may need very high contrast to discern differences when displayed in black and white. Careful use of colour could be very helpful.

• It's good form to contract the X-axis values where possible, so use, for example, "1996, '98, 2000, '02, '04" rather than spelling each year out in full.

No, it's not. It's ugly. It's also contrary to the official guidelines for dates.

I'd also suggest some additional guidelines:

• The source should be optimised for editability. For example, group elements intelligently, such as pie slices with captions, and do not rely on one element obscuring another to convey statistical information.