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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Multimedia and Commons/Add wikitext description pages for Commons tabular data files

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Add wikitext description pages for Commons tabular data files

  • Problem: Commons .tab and .map files cannot have categories, nor be described in wikitext, nor be described in structured data.
    Without descriptions or categories, the files aren't readily discoverable. It is not even currently possible to document what particular rows, or columns, or cells represent. Nor is it possible to describe properly where the data has come from, or any issues with it.
  • Who would benefit: The Commons tabular-data space is available to store tabular-data files up to 2Mb in size. Such files might represent eg the raw data shown on a graph (but in an reusable, examinable form), or important data series about the real world. But at the moment usability is crippled, because the files aren't describable or discoverable. As a result the potential is not used. Also sometimes people instead try to write large time-series into Wikidata items, for which they are utterly unsuited, causing difficulties and unfortunate item bloat on Wikidata. If our aim is making available the sum of human knowledge for every single human being to share, at the moment we are utterly failing to do that for tabular data.
  • Proposed solution: Attach a regular wikitext page to each tabular-data file, in the way we do for image files, to allow wikitext descriptions and categorisations of the files. Ideally also include a structured data slot, to allow the file metadata can be described and queried for using structured statements.
  • More comments: Ideally the description pages would act just like regular Commons pages. As a second-best it's also been suggested to add description pages as subpages (cf the '/doc' subpages used for templates), if that would be easier.
  • Phabricator tickets: T155290, T249896, T242596, T235332, T250919
  • Proposer: Jheald (talk) 19:22, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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