Tim Starling wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I think there is a growing sentiment that people do not want to fork Wikipedia to create Wikispecies. This makes a lot of sense. However, there is something important that is needed for Wikispecies which Wikipedia does not provide: efficient access of tabular data.
I was thinking along similar lines a couple of months ago, when considering the needs of Wikiquote, and to a lesser extent Wiktionary. The basic plan I came up with was:
- Each record is an arbitrary list of key-value pairs.
- User-designed edit forms and search forms constrain data entry to
particular fields
- User-designed display templates are used to format the data and
integrate it with other parts of the wiki
- Each field has an index, to allow fast searching and report generation.
- Indexes may be sparse, with most records not containing a given
field. I believe this can be efficiently handled by creating a separate table for each key, on demand at runtime.
It would be cool if there was some way to differentiate language specific and language-neutral data. A 747's wingspan is the same irrespective of language, should be possible to record and edit in only one place, but the common name of Homo sapiens is per-language.
Stan