Has anybody thought about wiki databases? By these I mean applying the wiki idea to data that is most naturally organized as a database rather than as plain text. In practice, I visualize the edit page as resembling a list of smaller text boxes, and then having one or more display formatters to build a readable page from the raw database entry. The closest I could see online is a TWiki plugin, but it didn't look like it had a special UI.
The reason I'm interested in the general concept is that it seems to have cropped up in several contexts:
1. I've been working on a scheme to handle WP's thousands of bibliographic references. The idea is to have a sort of combination of BibTex and the Image namespace; each referenced work gets an entry with a name, you fill in fields of the entry, then just mention the name as something like [[Ref:Arnett2001]] in articles and the software puts out formatted author/title/ISBN etc. However, the ability to format consistently depends on the reference's data being stored in database style, while still being available for editors to fix up.
2. Wiktionary. Dictionary entries are database entries, not free text. There should be a popup menu to add/choose the language for which you're writing the definition, a list of definition numbers that can be xref'ed properly, popups for parts of speech, and so on.
3. "Wikistamp". As part of my philatelic obsession, I've built up a database of worldwide postage stamp data. It now includes info on about 150,000 types - about half of all in existence - but the details are often incomplete, and wiki seems like a good way both to publish what exists and to enlist others in filling in, plus links to WP could have info on the stamps' subjects. However, I've only been able to do this singlehandedly because I have custom C code that does extensive validity checking - it knows that "ltolgrn" is a valid shorthand for the color "light olive grenn" but "grnollt" is not, that "1sh6p" is only valid for UK stamps before 1971, how to apply ranges of defaults, and so forth. A wikified version of this data would need to have the rules continue to be enforced by software.
These kinds of things seem like obvious uses for the application of the wiki approach to database content. Is this just something that people haven't thought of doing before? Are there fundamental obstacles to implementation? (I'm reading the MediaWiki sources now, haven't yet tried to hack on them.)
Stan