This is an umbrella bug report for a range of high-impact, long-standing bugs which prevent sharing + collaboration on documents and data.
See also @JeanFred's original tracking bug T44725, linked to **over 200** other tickets, including hundreds of formats not covered here.
**The problem**:
- It is impossible to share data files, and very hard to share document files, on Wikimedia projects. This limits the efficacy of community members, and of outreach to new communities (//Who would join a community that rejects every format of their work?//).
- Adding new format support is easy, and the highest-impact work we do, but inertia + lack of clear process has made it surprisingly rare. After two decades we have support for only [[ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Allowable_file_types | 20 filetypes ]]. The //only// media category where we support the most common formats (directly or via transcoding) is Images.
- Many filetypes that our communities depend on to run the projects and do daily research, are blocked from upload to our wikis -- pushing them to use non-free services (such as Dropbox or Google), or non-public ones (such as email).
**Issues blocking uploading data + documents:**
**0) Organize related tickets and data: Add FileTypes tag for new requests + analyses. **
> There are hundreds of file formats we should eventually support; the hard-to-follow response to dozens of past bugs on related issues is in part related to the lack of a single queue for related work.
> The "[[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Adding_support_for_new_filetypes | how to add support for new filetypes ]]" guide is a great start; a tag here will help. Work on things like finessing tabular-data support (into a new namespace) (on Commons only) might also merit the tag.
- 0.1) Reopen tickets for gathering relevant data. T77796 - data on what unsupported filetypes are being uploaded
**1) Add Data and Documents as categories in Commons search.**
> (Currently it has Images, Audio, Video, and Other Media -- add Documents, Data, before Other)
- 1.1) Make these search .tab and .map datasets in the Data namespace - T252327
- 1.2) Allow searching Newfiles to filter by format. - T66768
**2) Add upload support for essential document file formats **
> (Currently we support only PDF, arguable the least open of all of these, and DJVU)
- 2.1) Add .RDF support
- 2.3) Add .EPUB format - is there an underlying problem w/ zipped formats? T252250
- 2.2) Add .ODT support - T45154 (for all ODF formats)
- 2.4) Add .ODP support - T45154 (for all ODF formats), (presentations)
- 2.5) Review other OO formats - OASIS (T4089),
**3) Add upload support for essential data file formats**
> (Currently we support NO STRUCTURED DATA FORMATS AT ALL, despite using them in every technical part of our workflow)
> "There is currently a major issue with storing statistical data in Wikidata, which would be solved if we could upload the data to Commons as Tabular Data files." - @NavinoEvans on T181319
- 3.1) Add .CSV support - in use across wikimedia, just not as files
- 3.2) Add .JSON support - in use on many other MW instances, see T68036
- 3.3) Add .XML support (see also Music XML + Lilypond: T214023 , T208494)
- 3.4) Add .SQLite support (widely used, selected as an archival format by the Library of Congress)
- 3.5) Add .ODS support : T45151
- 3.6) Update related conversations. [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/How_to_deal_with_open_datasets | How to deal with open datasets ]], [[ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Project_scope/Allowable_file_types | Talk:Allowable file types ]]