I don’t know anything about your Fab domain, but I’ve built a number of wikis that are designed like that: tiddlers that are mostly data, and templates to display them and link them together in various combinations. One recent example, for a chess club at my company, is at http://scott.com/Tiddlywiki/Demo/ClubDemo/v2/, slightly anonymized with fake names and stock photos.
I find this quite useful for relatively small data sets. I don’t know how far it will scale.
That wiki right now has three main data types: Members, Meetings, and Puzzles (the latter broken into two subtypes.) There are 14 non-system tags, nine or ten of which are about content and the others structural, such as TOC-hierarchy tags and TODO.) There are about a dozen main content tiddlers, with text of their own, and then 100 Member tiddlers (many with an associated avatar image tiddler), a dozen Meeting tiddlers (more if I go back to cover prior years), and 231 Puzzle tiddlers – a total of 453 non-system tiddlers.
This is supplemented by 35 custom system tiddlers (templates, stylesheets, macros, editing configurations, and so on) and 28 overridden TW tiddlers.
Altogether, that leads to something slightly over 500 tiddlers. So it’s not tiny, but also not very large.
I have another one that I hope the anonymize and be able to share here that has much more data, around 4500 tiddlers, built the same way, with data tiddlers and templates doing the bulk of the work. So this style is certainly possible, and I think it’s quite powerful. A third example is my periodic pable demo. which started primarily as an attempt to build precisely this sort of wiki, although has morphed into a hybrid with a more traditional wiki.
I don’t use TW much as a personal notebook. For me it’s more of a framework for these sorts of single-file UI/database combinations. I think it works quite well.
To build these, it has helped me to have programming skills to convert external data formats into data tiddlers. I tend to do this in Node, create a JSON file, and drag that into my wiki. As long as I don’t mess with the title structure, I can repeatedly do that until I have the structure just the way I want it, and the import simply overlays the last run. I have also gotten reasonably competent at running batch operations of my data inside the wiki itself – but you can probably do that just as well with Mohammad’s Commander. If you don’t have programming skills to do the sort of data conversion I mention, I’m sure there are people here who can help you figure out other ways to do it.
So yes, not only is this possible, but I find it fun!
