Svetlana, thanks for suggestion. I think we should create a portal similar to the Structured Data one, and put some examples there.  Deciding on the name is difficult :)   "Commons Datasets" does sound good.

There has been a very prolonged discussion on where to host this feature - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/Storing_data. Wikidata would have been a good choice, but users expect all the data there to be in public domain, and we may add more licensing choices later.

An inline example with English commentary -- straight on the first page about this new technology without making users click links -- could be nice. The text you typed up does not seem to be on a wiki page, so I am unable to edit it...

Which page are you referring to?

On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 4:03 PM Svetlana Tkachenko <svetlana@members.fsf.org> wrote:
Hello,

Maybe 'commons store' or 'commons datasets' could work? I would suggest
that the name reflects on the fact that the datasets are shared
('common') and are not on Wikidata.

If I may ask, why is it in commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:* and not at
Meta (like Global user pages) or Wikidata (like structured data about
lots of things)?

An inline example with English commentary -- straight on the first page
about this new technology without making users click links -- could be
nice. The text you typed up does not seem to be on a wiki page, so I am
unable to edit it...

Svetlana.