Infoboxes like MediaWiki/Wikipedia, but not just using trackers

• Feature request

MediaWiki/Wikipedia has an interesting way of dealing with meta-data concerning a wiki page. Infobox is very flexible and is very suitable to an encyclopedia. It's easy to create new ones and they are very flexible to adapt to the topic. As soon as a bunch of pages have something in common, you can create one and it gives visitors and quick overview of what characteristics this entry has.

There are over a hundred of these templates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Infobox_templates

Here is a simple one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Animal

Here is a more advanced one where special language codes, when parsed, are shown with a nice presentation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel

This is a great way to have ad-hoc, organically growing meta-data around wiki pages which share some sort of structured/comparative data.

In TikiWiki, we use trackers for tabular data. We need to have an even tighter integration.

Goal: that the metadata be stored both in the wiki page and the trackers
That you can update in one or the other. This would permit us to make lists/tables with all the data from all the infoboxes, without duplicating the data. (not sure if/how to do this with MediaWiki)

We'd need a Wiki Page field-type in trackers. Say I have an "Animals" tracker with all the Meta-Data. One of the fields should be the name of the associated wiki page. And that wiki pages "knows" to get latest data from tracker (like we do now for PluginTrackerList and PluginTrackerItemField.

[09:48]	marclaporte: Say I have lots of data in various infoboxes, is it possible to make a report/list/table of all these infoboxes and have them link to the various wiki pages?
[09:48]	Splarka: you can use Special:Whatlinkshere on each infobox
[09:48]	Splarka: (sorta)
[09:49]	marclaporte: tks, would you know of an example?
[09:51]	Dantman|FS: SMW
[09:51]	Dantman|FS: Doing that with data is basically the purpose of SMW
[09:52]	Splarka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Infobox_Aircraft
[09:52]	marclaporte: There are some lists here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software  -> how to reuse that info in infoboxes on each page
[09:52]	marclaporte: tks
[09:53]	marclaporte: Splarka: : yes, that's what I am looking for
[10:05]	marclaporte: Splarka: : So now I know where the template is used. What if I want to make a mega chart for all the planes from all the infoboxes?
[10:06]	Splarka: well, that might be something more for the category system
[10:06]	Splarka: (or ask Dan about SMW, unless he means Super Mario World)
[10:08]	Dantman|FS: heh
[10:10]	marclaporte: Dantman|FS: : What is SMW?
[10:10]	Dantman|FS: Semantic MediaWiki
[10:10]	Dantman|FS: http://semantic-mediawiki.com/
[10:11]	Dantman|FS: It's an extension for MediaWiki

Other things to think about:

• When watching a wiki page, how to watch tracker(s) which are associated with that wiki page?
• In page editing of tracker data, have a quick & nice interface like the dynamic variable feature

Related:

• Support some of the MediaWiki syntax that doesn't conflict with TikiWiki syntax
• Wiki editing: Preview with diff, like Mediawiki
• Support for the Wiki creole markup (syntax)
• MediaWiki import script

Started in 2.x, done in 3.0

http://doc.tikiwiki.org/page+tracker
http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Pretty+Tracker

Still need "Wiki only" solution

This bug has been demonstrated on show2.tiki.org

Please demonstrate your bug on show2.tiki.org