Talk:WikiCatalog

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

I think this could be an interesting idea. I have myself as of lately been thinking of some web based tool to easily compare various software (and hardware!) Possibly, if not preferably, wiki based. My thoughts so far has been something which complements and expands Wikipedia articles such as "Comparison of X software" (see en:Category:Software comparisons). The drawbacks I see with these articles as of present are:

  1. that it is pretty hard to extract the wanted information ("which pieces of software/hardware have these five user-specified features?")
  2. that due to the nature of being unsearchable, they have to be restricted in their scope as not to overwhelm the reader completely
  3. that they not easily let themselves be extended with additional datapoints ("I want to add feature X to the comparison") without manually rebuilding the lists, by adding a column, and possibly reformatting the whole page as the table turns out to be too wide.

Of course, to actually do anything about that problem, one would need Wikidata in one form or other. But as I don't see that being deployed at Wikipedia, I think a dedicated project such as this might be the way to go. \Mike 20:44, 12 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]