Village Pump (technical) - Better Table Editing?

Better Table Editing?

One of the perils of editing a table with lots of columns and/or rows is that if you try to add or delete an entry or column, you can mess up the whole table.

Is there/should there be any way to make it possible to edit a table like you would in Word or Excel or something? That is, have an interface that looks like a table, where you can add or remove columns from the top of the table (instead of having to individually add the new column to each row), and edit a cell or add or delete a row without the possibility of messing up the "framing" for the rest of the table. It would let less computer-savvy people add things to tables without worrying about screwing up the entire table, and make it a *lot* less time-consuming to add a new column to a table with a lot of rows.

To keep people from throwing in gratuitous tables or whatever, you could restrict "table edit" to existing manually-created tables, but letting people add information to an existing table without having to worry quite so much about the format of the table would be nice.

(for example, recently, on the "vampire traits" page, I added a new column to one of the tables, and that page has something like 75 entries per table...)

The VisualEditor - which in the long run will make Word/Excel style editing possible - went into alpha testing on the English Wikipedia last week; details here, and you can enable it in preferences. (It's opt-in for the moment) Tables are not currently supported, but hopefully that functionality will be along soon :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:58, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Yay! Any ETA on it reaching the general public, and/or the addition of table functionality?... Tamtrible (talk) 22:12, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure about specific elements, but the development plan calls for it to be "enabled by default for (almost) every wikipedia/mediawiki instance" - presumably with all functionality up and running - by July 2013. It may well slip - it's a hard project - but they did manage to make the December 2012 target for initial deployment, so you never know :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 22:39, 17 December 2012 (UTC)