Stan Shebs wrote:
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.
Already today, a Wikipedia page can contain subsections that are edited independently. What you suggest is in a way an extension of this, with individual database fields being editable. Another way to solve the user interface is to mine (parse) database fields out of the plain text. This is already done for [[links]], but could be done for other kinds of syntax as well. I have a wiki with a reg.exp that parses dates written in plain text (January 17, 1948) without having to put them in brackets. The dates found by this reg.exp are put in a database table that can be used to extract timelines across articles.
Apart from plain text wiki articles and the database tables you are talking about, a third data structure is the spread sheet. Each wiki page could be like an Excel sheet with values and formulas in a grid. Wiki links could reference values from cells on the same page or other pages, e.g. [[C,5]] * 17 + [[budget:A,3]].
There are a lot of new ways to try. Too few are doing this.