Report to Threshold

Lawrence F. London, Jr. lfl at intrex.net
Wed Jun 7 13:49:10 EDT 2006


Richard Archer wrote:

> At 9:17 AM -0400 7/6/06, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> 
> 
>>Making wiki-based interactive online resources available makes it easy
>>to acquire quality data like this
>>and its portable so can be accessed by your database.
> 
> 
> Wikis generally store plain text.
> 
> Databases generally store highly structured data.

I was thinking about that and comparing it with with storage.
What's the difference, on the user end, between entering a large amount
of information on a variety of items and subjects in a wiki page or pages
and entering the same data into a database? What if the result you wanted from the DB was
a nice outline or a list or maybe in other formats?

> The two aren't easily interchangeable. So if you set up
> a wiki to collect data you're going to have plain text.
> It would be a nightmare of mythical proportions to
> transform that text into structured data which can then
> be analysed efficiently.

You explained this to me before and I understand it better now.
Its just that data is so easy to enter into a wikipage and can be so diverse (using
uploaded graphics as well as text) and add to this external linking and even appending a blog with all its features.

I thought XML made wikidata portable so databases can import it?





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