On Saturday 13 September 2008 08:58:23 River Tarnell wrote:
instead, what about a collaborative 'report' tool? i would envisage this working as follows: each query (for example, '100 users with most edits') is described in a file. the exact way isn't that important, but for the sake of example, the file might look like this:
Yes, this is an excellent idea! :) Most of my tools (http://toolserver.org/~nikola/ - articlesby, grep, namestats, whatlinks) are built basically in the way you describe. And I have ideas for more, but they would surely be easier to make and use with the report tool.
then for users, there's a web interface where they can select the wiki and the report they want to run. for queries that need parameters (e.g. those that report on a particular article), they could select the article (preferably with a nice ajaxy input box). then the SQL might look like:
SELECT ... WHERE page_namespace=<NAMESPACE> AND page_title=<TITLE>
<NAMESPACE> and <TITLE> would be filled in by the report generator.
the web interface would display the result of the query in a nice, easy-to-read table (and probably with some kind of XML or CSV export feature). any project developer would be able to add new queries, which users could request in JIRA.
Add wiki syntax to the list of exports :)
Have some practical ideas, will write about them later.