@Yurik: "Unless a good reason is given, there will be no way to access data directly from wiki markup. Introducing a complex wikimarkup function to get a single cell's value seems overly complex and error prone, and should be done via Lua functions."
Does the creation of 100000+ pages because wiki markup to access data in tables doesn't exist count as a good reason?
@Alexis Jazz just because something is being done does not mean it has to be done that way -- could you elaborate what is being done there and why? It might very well be a good reason, or it might be that there is a much better way to do that.
To quote MarcoSwart (Bureaucrat and interface administrator on Dutch Wiktionary, not just a random user) whose bot did this: "To use the Data: namespace on Commons we'd need a Lua script to query the data. This would needlessly complicate managing it all." (originally: "Om de Data: naamruimte op Commons te gebruiken, moet er vervolgens weer een Lua script komen om de gegevens te raadplegen. Die oplossing zou ook qua beheer in dit geval zaken nodeloos compliceren.")
If there were a simple way to obtain the data using wikimarkup we'd probably be using the Data: namespace. If there were some off-the-shelf module (that we don't need to maintain) that would allow one to say {{#invoke:mydatawhereisit|SELECT preval-nl FROM Leesonderzoek2013 WHERE woord = '{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}'}} in which "Leesonderzoek2013" would refer to Leesonderzoek2013.tab and putting this on wikt:nl:eland would return "98".. we'd most strongly consider that. (I would prefer it over the current solution but I can't speak for the rest of the community) Actually if that were possible the usage of tabular data would likely explode across projects. Because right now, while I've been told on multiple occasions that I'm not stupid, I'm having quite some trouble figuring out how any of this works.
@Mxn: I don't know if this is coincidence, but w:Module:Tabular data looks mighty promising..
It works, I made an SQL-style wrapper around it: wikt:nl:Sjabloon:tabular query/SQL as well as a template with more conventional Wiki parameters: wikt:nl:Sjabloon:tabular query.
I'm curious to see how this performs compared to other methods. Time for some testing.
