Wiki Database, is there one?

Question

I was searching the net for something like a wiki database, just like wikipedia but instead stores structured content, editable by users. What I was looking for was an online database accessible by everyone where people can design the schema and data with proper versioning of both schema and data. I couldn't find any such site. I am not sure if it is my search skills or if there really is no wiki database as of now. Does anyone out there know anything like this?

I think there is a great potential for something like this. A possible example will be a website with a GUI for querying a MySQL DB where any website visitor can create DB objects and populate data.

Answer 1

Something that might come close to your requirements is Google Docs.

What's offered is document editing roughly similar to MS Word, and spreadsheets roughly similar to Excel. I'm thinking of the latter, of course.

In Google Docs, You can create spreadsheets for free; being spreadsheets, they naturally have a row-and-column structure similar to a database, and which you can define flexibly. You can also share these sheets with other people. This seems to be a by-invite-only process rather than open-to-all, but there may be other possibilities I'm not aware of, or that level of sharing might be enough for you in any case.

Answer 2

I like this idea. I have heard of some sites that are trying to pull together large datasets for various things for open consumption, but none that would allow a wiki feel.

You could start with something as simple as an installation of myphpadmin with a known password that would allow people to log in, create a database, edit data and query from any other site on the web.

It might suffer from more accuracy problems than wikipedia though.

Answer 3

This might be like what you're looking for: dbpedia.org. They're working on extracting data from Wikipedia, and encoding it in a structured format using RDF, so that it can be queried using SPARQL.

Linkeddata.org has a big list of RDF data sets.

Answer 4

Do you mean something like http://www.freebase.com?

Answer 5

Perhaps you might be interested in Couch DB:

Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

Answer 6

mindtouch should be able to do it. It's rather easy to get data in / out. (for example: it's trivial to aggregate all the IP's for servers into one table).

I pretty much use it as a DB in the wiki itself (pages have tables, key/value..inheritance, templates, etc...) but you can also interface with the API, write dekiscript, grab the XML...

Answer 7

It's not quite what you're looking for, but Semantic Mediawiki adds database-like features to MediaWiki:

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

It's still fundamentally a Wiki, but you can add semantic tags to pages ([[foo::bar]] [[baz::1000]]) and then do database-type queries across them: SELECT baz FROM pages WHERE foo=bar would be {{#ask: [[foo::bar]] | ?baz}}. There is even an embryonic SPARQL implementation for pseudo-SQL queries.