pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

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?