Great work! 

I'm happy with the new naming, Commons Datasets.

For historical maps we have been waiting to have a way to store data about the rectification with the map image. Here it is! It brings us one notch closer to being able to work with zoomable historical maps in Wikipedia. 

Some have noted that the datasets are contrary to what Wikidata is about. Instead, they are complementary! Not all data is either suitable for Wikidata or licensed openly enough. Or not yet. Many great datasets can be introduced to the Wikimedia online communities. The data owners will pay attention to more open licensing, seeing their data being used. The wikidatans will pick up interesting datasets and work to prepare missing properties for them in Wikidata and ignite their bots. Sometimes the data can just be used as is.

This is one part of the puzzle and it will be interesting to see how the pieces fall into their places and evolve further. 

In the coming few days there'll be time to digest and experiment.

Happy holidays
Susanna

2016-12-23 5:22 GMT+02:00 Bohdan Melnychuk <base-w@yandex.ru>:
Yay :)

As someone who already has plans to actively use it in both my metapedian role (e.g. CEE Spring article writing contest statistics data for building Graphs from being stored like https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:BaseBot/CEES/MMXVI/Per_country_sums_(general)&action=edit to a better format of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Wikimedia/CEE_Spring/Statistics/MMXVI/Per_country_sums_(general).tab which can be turned by Lua to the same output but now with it being controlled on wiki rather than bot code part) and exopedianish for actual articles I think it is wonderful.

I do think that it needs tight cross linking with Wikidata and perfectly a way to run queries against both the sources at the same time (e.g. "give me the weather in all the current capitals in the date the comet Whatever was closest to the Sun the last time" or whatever else more useful thing may come into one's mind), but that does not deny the fact that it is very useful already.
 
It can also be used as an intermediate location for data on the way to be imported to Wikidata, IMHO.

--Base


22.12.2016, 21:31, "Yuri Astrakhan" <yastrakhan@wikimedia.org>:
Gift season! We have launched structured data on Commons, available from all wikis.

TLDR; One data store. Use everywhere. Upload table data to Commons, with localization, and use it to create wiki tables, lists, or use directly in graphs. Works for GeoJSON maps too. Must be licensed as CC0. Try this per-state GDP map demo, and select multiple years. More demos at the bottom.

Data can now be stored as *.tab and *.map pages in the data namespace on Commons. That data may contain localization, so a table cell could be in multiple languages. And that data is accessible from any wikis, by Lua scripts, Graphs, and Maps.

Lua lets you generate wiki tables from the data by filtering, converting, mixing, and formatting the raw data. Lua also lets you generate lists. Or any wiki markup.

Graphs can use both .tab and .map directly to visualize the data and let users interact with it. The GDP demo above uses a map from Commons, and colors each segment with the data based on a data table.

Kartographer (<maplink>/<mapframe>) can use the .map data as an extra layer on top of the base map. This way we can show endangered species' habitat.

== Demo ==
== Getting started ==
* Try creating a page at data:Sandbox/<user>.tab on Commons. Don't forget the .tab extension, or it won't work.
* Try using some data with the Line chart graph template
A thorough guide is needed, help is welcome!

== Documentation links ==
If you find a bug, create Phabricator ticket with #tabular-data tag, or comment on the documentation talk pages.

== FAQ ==
* Relation to Wikidata:  Wikidata is about "facts" (small pieces of information). Structured data is about "blobs" - large amounts of data like the historical weather or the outline of the state of New York.

== TODOs ==
* Add a nice "table editor" - editing JSON by hand is cruel. T134618
* "What links here" should track data usage across wikis. Will allow quicker auto-refresh of the pages too. T153966
* Support data redirects. T153598
* Mega epic: Support external data feeds.
,

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