I've had this idea for a little while, and I'm not aware of it existing already. You've probably heard of fotowiki.net, for wiki-ing photos.
Anyhow, my idea is for a wiki based on tables instead of pages (or some pages could be normal pages and others would be tables). Essentially the edit screen would look like Excel without all the formatting. All it would need is wiki formatting (links, possibly with CamelHumpedText), bold, italic, and headings. It would also preferrably have the ability to merge and unmerge cells, but that level of complexity may be unnecessary. Being in the wiki spirit, I'd like it to be as simple as possible.
Any thoughts on this? Have you heard of something like this? I believe that Excel itself may have some sort of this capability, but I'd like it to be free/open, multi-platform, and more wikilike. -- MichaelFagan (e-mail to SunirShah)
Michael, I agree - this is a direction I have wanted wiki to go for a while. I am in contact with an internet friend who I believe has the tools already created for this, using Excel. Looking forward to something interesting coming of this. -- MarkDilley
So Mark, any news on this? http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Translators_Sources is one thing I've made that I'd much rather use a TableWiki for -- MichaelFagan
I emailed him and he emailed back, but didn't respond to the Table Wiki request of sharing his idea/project. So I re-emailed him. Will do so again. Thanks for the prompt. MarkDilley
What about making it more generic? I'm one of the main contributors to the [Horde] wiki. Horde is a PHP application development library, and also a suite of applications which are built on top of that library which integrate with each other (the integration could always be tighter). It has an address book application, webmail, trouble ticket/bug tracking system, and a calendar, among other things. We use the wiki from it internally as our forum system, to document things, and in many ways as a contact manager. I've been thinking of different ways to integrate the address book into the wiki (not easy to do without offending the gods of wiki), and I've had these thoughts:
- Each application could provide a hook to render it's object in a display way and an editable way (for example, a contact in an address book).
- Some pages can be associated with these objects somehow.
- A user can create a page "from an object," perhaps?
- Some pages could have implicit associations based on their name. For example a page named "August 17, 2004" might automatically associate with the calendar day "object".
- The page becomes a placeholder for that object. Alternately, the page could still have wiki text which would appear below the inserted object.
This is the best I've got so far on how to do this. In your case, there would be a "table" object. Perhaps each cell in the table is also a wiki page, and the table is just a display mechanism?
I'm still struggling with how to keep things simple. In my example, there would have to be a lot of per-object backing code (how do I show diffs of a contact record? Of a calendar day?). It seems it would get hairy fast.
Hope something here helps :)
In my wiki engine, I've built the underlying object structure such that a wiki object has a MIME type associated with it, and the page is displayed/edited appropriately for that MIME type. Right now "text/wiki" is the primary MIME type; but there is also "wiki/config" for the config object (editable almost like a wiki page), "wiki/intermap" for the InterMap, and "wiki/user" for username and (optionally) password information.
It won't be very much effort to extend this to other MIME types so that files can be attached to the wiki just like wiki pages. You could then store pictures right in the wiki (much like OddMuse does). -- anon.
I like it! Our other applications would just register their own wiki mime handlers. -- JasonFelice