Hi all,
I've been working for the past month on an browser-based editor for JSON, called JSONwidget. For those of you unfamiliar with JSON, it's a data serialization format, which is a fancy way of saying text markup for structured data. It's one of two alternatives to XML that is gaining traction as simpler, more compact formats text formats for data serialization (the other one being YAML).
Anyway, what my tool does is takes a JSON file and a JSON-formatted schema, and renders a user interface for editing the JSON, creating neatly formatted JSON on the client for submission back to the server.
Here are the demos: http://robla.net/2005/jsonwidget/#demos
Note that this version has only been tested with Firefox 1.0.7. I plan to fix many known bugs in IE and Opera in my next release, and would welcome help from users of other browsers. There are still plenty of rough edges even for Firefox users, but there should be enough there to give you an idea of where its heading.
For those that object to fancy Javascript interfaces on philosophical grounds, you'll be pleased to know that it does have a failover mode. If Javascript is turned off, you are presented with a simple web form to edit the raw JSON. Not pretty, but functional in a pinch.
I'm not sure if something like this could be adapted for Wikidata; I haven't had a chance to really dive in and see where that project is at. But I'm throwing that out there as a possibility.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks Rob