A more structured wiki?

August 12, 2005 7:52 PM

I am looking to incorporate the mediawiki model into a more structured environment. Specifically, users should be able to add "artist" and "album" entities to a music database, and then the content related to these entities should be wikis. These things cannot just be ordinary mediawiki "articles", because I want to make comparisons on the data that requires differentiating between what kind of data it is. Does anyone know of any project that does anything like this, or have any ideas of how to do it with the least amount of coding possible?
posted by northernsoul to computers & internet (2 comments total)

TWiki is a structured wiki.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 9:22 PM on August 12, 2005

This sounds like what Mediawiki's namespaces are for.

For instance, Wikipedia differentiates between enyclopedia data (Gregor Mendel), discussion of encyclopedia articles (Talk:Gregor Mendel, in the "Talk" namespace), editors (User:Mendel, yours truly), discussion about editors (User talk:Mendel), pages about Wikipedia itself (Wikipedia:Namespace), and so on.

That last link explains a bit more about namespaces in Wikipedia, and the Mediawiki documentation on namespaces is here.

You could decide that one sort of data is in the main namespace (so you'd have Pink Floyd and Album:Dark Side of the Moon) or vice versa, or decide that both have to live in their own specific namespaces.

(Twiki's multiple-wikis approach might do it, but having used Twiki for a couple of years prior to using MoinMoin and MediaWiki I wouldn't wish Twiki on anyone.)
posted by mendel at 9:41 PM on August 12, 2005