About

Independent project — no Wikimedia affiliation. wikicells is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikibase, or MediaWiki. References and comparisons to those projects on this page identify the open-source software being deployed (Wikibase, MediaWiki) or describe design influences and technical interoperability (federating with Wikidata, following MediaWiki conventions); conformance to their standards is not a claim of affiliation. "Wikipedia," "Wikimedia," and "Wikidata" are trademarks of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Mission

wikicells is open-source infrastructure for community-edited Creative Commons databases. It exists to answer one question: what if Wikipedia's contribution model applied to spreadsheet rows and column definitions, not just article prose?

Why this exists

A wiki gives you community-edited prose with full revision history, attribution, and Wikipedia-style permissions (including redaction of harmful content). A spreadsheet gives you rows and columns. Most open-source platforms do one or the other — none do both at cell-level granularity.

The closest existing platform is Wikidata (built on Wikibase), which models the world as items with statements: every fact is a structured assertion, every assertion has revision history, every property is itself a wiki entity. This project takes that model and packages it so any organization can deploy a similar Creative Commons resource with minimal effort.

Two goals

1. Build the infrastructure so that other organizations can spin up similar wikified-database sites.
2. Use that infrastructure to host the project's own documentation (the site you're reading) and a specific target site (details forthcoming).

Values

• Give back to the commons. Structured data is licensed CC0 so it flows frictionlessly to Wikidata and other open repositories.
• Be open and interoperable. Federated Properties with Wikidata are enabled from day one. RDF dumps and a SPARQL endpoint are public.
• Encourage others to do the same. Infrastructure is open-source. Deployment is reproducible. The project itself models the patterns it advocates.

Status

Pre-Hello-World. See Roadmap.