Difference between revisions of "User talk:HappyDog"

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(hello. I'm very interested in the potential of WikiDB and am very keen to apply it to consumeria-wikis)
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The mission statement of Consumeria is simply to "enhance consumer informedness" and I really hope it is a cause that more people would find worth pursuing. Anyways, WikiDB extension seems very well thought out and promising. Best wishes --[[User:Juxo|Juxo]] 18:43, 3 October 2007 (BST)
 
The mission statement of Consumeria is simply to "enhance consumer informedness" and I really hope it is a cause that more people would find worth pursuing. Anyways, WikiDB extension seems very well thought out and promising. Best wishes --[[User:Juxo|Juxo]] 18:43, 3 October 2007 (BST)
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== AMAZING! ==
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Simply amazing! Keep up the good work.  I do dabble in PHP and SQL, so if I can be of any help, i'll try to help out where I can.  I'm not an expert programmer, but if I can help. I would love to.  I'll check my user page here occasionally if you need some help. [[User:Tazzy|Tazzy]] 01:14, 19 January 2008 (GMT)

Revision as of 01:14, 19 January 2008

I am writing to express support for your work on WikiDB and also to say that it is disappointing that the importance of this type of effort does not seem to have been appreciated in the MediaWiki community.

I was wondering whether your work might not have a greater chance of support and indeed inclusion into MediaWiki if it wasn't (at least initially) more focused on a specific and perhaps more urgent problem, which I'll illustrate using the example of artists and their works.

To be quite concrete, here's the problem description.

The "infobox" for artists should provide detailed information based on a template and data in a table. For simplicity, I'll assume that it's just one row in a single table.

The "infobox" for a work of art should similarly be based on a template and data which (for simplicity again) I'll assume comes from two tables - one for artists, and the other for works of art. The data about artists that appears in the works infobox would presumably be a small subset of the available data, e.g. just the artist's name, birth and death dates.

The basic requirement then is to have a way to construct a pretty infobox based on one or two rows of data. The trickiness is how to specify an artist (assuming that combinations such as name, birth and death names will not suffice).

In other contexts, one could (perhaps) use the ULAN system for artists, but that is unsatisfactory if there is even a single artist for whom a ULAN number has not (yet?) been assigned.

A hash of the basic data would be OK if that data was invariant, which is not likely. An accession number is error-prone and raises portability difficulties, but so far as I can tell would probably be the best general approach. Anyway, let's suppose an accession number is used.

For this to work, I believe that a "data-driven data entry form" for creating a record will be needed. Let me explain why.

We can use the template mechanism for defining new tables, but there has to be a way to perform the usual database operations. This effectively requires a form whose content is determined by the table definition.

For example, let's suppose Template:Define Artist defines the fields of the Artist table in some declarative manner. Then Special:Table page would allow all the CRUD operations:

This scheme I believe resolves all the significant issues except one:

  • What happens to existing records if the "Define Artist" template is changed?

Simplicity, I believe, would argue for adopting a rule to the effect that a table-defining template cannot be changed if there is any data that would be invalidated. This would, for example, allow more fields to be added, or the name of a field to be changed if there were no records with a value for that field.

Thanks,

Peter Koppstein (pkoppstein@gmail.com)


Hello there HappyDog. I've been the lead developer/researcher/designer/strategist for The Consumerium development project That wiki is now closed for editing (the wiki got badly spammed-out/vandalised making contributing almost impossible. Also internal incoherence reached a level due to many changes in the design paradigm that effectively obstructed making sense. But the work continues now in http://en.consumeria.info/wiki/ (Which is an attempt at an "implementation"-phase).

I invite you most warmly to register there so we could discuss how WikiDB could potentially be a solution to some serious problems regarding redundancy and needlessly high level of manual editing. I also sent you some emails but have received no reply. Otoh it might be better to discuss WikiDB and it's future development lines and application to making Consumeria a reality here, in this wiki, might be a better idea as it might attract more interested individuals to this development wiki if there were active discussions/planning going on around here.

The mission statement of Consumeria is simply to "enhance consumer informedness" and I really hope it is a cause that more people would find worth pursuing. Anyways, WikiDB extension seems very well thought out and promising. Best wishes --Juxo 18:43, 3 October 2007 (BST)

AMAZING!

Simply amazing! Keep up the good work. I do dabble in PHP and SQL, so if I can be of any help, i'll try to help out where I can. I'm not an expert programmer, but if I can help. I would love to. I'll check my user page here occasionally if you need some help. Tazzy 01:14, 19 January 2008 (GMT)