Extension:DataTable2/Description

The  extension is conceptually the converse of the basic idea of Semantic MediaWiki extension and similar approaches. For instance, with Semantic MediaWiki you can store the population of a number of cities in the respective pages (hence one record per page, unless you work with subobjects) and retrieve these data in other pages, including pages making up lists of cities. With DataTable2, you can store the population data of many cities on one page (or a number of pages) and retrieve it on other pages, including pages making up lists of cities. Hence the DataTable2 extension is useful for you whenever you wish to maintain information in a centralized place and use it on many other pages.

Furthermore, this extension allows you to comfortably enter data for fancy tables because you can enter the data just in tabular form with field and record separators of your choice, and then define a template that does all the formatting. This can be useful even if you do not need to retrieve the data on other pages.

I'm not aware of any other MediaWiki extension that provides these concepts in a generic way. The idea and the basics of its implementation are borrowed from the Tasks Extension which does the same thing for a specific purpose.

If you intend to do nontrivial things with your data, you might consider installing the Extension:Scribunto as well. DataTable2 includes a Lua library so that your Lua code can directly access the data.