This is an umbrella bug report for a set of recurring bugs that we have accepted for a long time, but which have increasingly become obstacles to both normal sharing of educational files on the projects, and to onboarding new community members who work with documents or data. (Because why should they join a community that does not accept their work?)
After two decades we have support for a meager [[ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Allowable_file_types | 20 filetypes ]]... The only media category in which we support the most widely used formats (directly or via transcoding) is Images... and we rely on filetypes in our daily collaborations that are blocked from upload to Commons.
**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 ]]