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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data

< Community Wishlist Survey 2023‎ | Editing

Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data

  • Problem: Most graphs are uploaded by the creator as an image and can't be edited by anyone else. You can use tabular data that can be edited by anyone, but this requires knowledge of JSON and the tabular data system.
  • Proposed solution: Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data pages. This same tool could seemingly be used to edit any JSON page.
  • Who would benefit: Editors of tabular data, and readers who want to consume more up-to-date data.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T248897
  • Proposer: Wikideas1 (talk) 09:18, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I tried it is too complicated. --Wikideas1 (talk) 05:57, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

IMO there are a number of problems that make Graph + tabular data infeasible in practice, solving any one of them would be a good step.

  • Make the tabular data editor a little more functional (T248897).
    • On top of that, maybe make it possible to edit without going to Commons.
  • Allow flexible (more granular that the whole spreadsheet) sourcing (T250919).
  • Show a useful diff for changes to a data table (as opposed to raw JSON diffs).
  • Figure out change propagation (right now Vega is just making cross-wiki API requests which is not a reasonable solution).
  • Figure out the no-JS experience for graphs (T249419) although this is probably too big for CommTech.
  • Add some kind of templating system for Graph, where you can plug in basic chart settings and get a Vega definition out of it. Maybe this can be done already with normal templates, not sure; there are some that are pretty easy to use (mw:Template:Graph:World Historical Highlights, mw:Template:Graph:Weather monthly history) but those all assume a very rigid data format and a very narrow use case.
    • Expose some of that functionality via VisualEditor.

On the more general topic of how to store data tables, there has been some discussion (related to Covid data) at T250065.

The improvements to the tabular data editor would be a good sized project for CommTech IMO, although in itself it doesn't help that much with this wish, but goes maybe third of the way towards decent graph management functionality. --Tgr (talk) 04:31, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the detailed breakdown of the situation, Tgr! I agree and am thinking that overall, rewording this proposal to suit the first task you mention (Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data pages) would make for a perfectly-sized project for us and would be helpful even beyond management of graphs. @Wikideas1: How do you feel about that? With your permission, I will make these changes to your proposal, then run them by you once more for approval. Let me know what you'd like to do. Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 03:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That all sounds good to me.
Thank you Wikideas1 (talk) 04:03, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Wikideas1 How does it look now? I also would like to rename the proposal to "Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data pages", but I'd like you to first confirm your happy with the rewording I've done to your proposal. Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds interesting I like it. I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like.
Wikideas1 (talk) 19:13, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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