People-Things Lookup Table
Google can find just about everything, but results are not organized in an easily searchable lookup reference table.
In my work I create a lot of music-related google spreadsheets. In them, I often refer to a particular composer or a performer and might also wish to display their birth date, for example. Last thing I want is to look it up every time. I'd rather have one reference table, which I could scan using a formula or a script, and retrieve the birth date (or any other) value.
So, I have a large table that lists a lot of people and their details like birth date, place of birth, associated website, and so on.
Because there are so many people in the world, I want to make this document editable ... by the world.
That way, it can be used by everyone and easily expanded, like Wikipedia.
But Wikipedia (similarly to Google) is a bunch of unorganized data, whereas I want this (and similar) lookup tables to be useful.
For example, sort all people by dates of birth to see all who were born in the same year. Then apply "chemist" filter to see only the chemists. And so on.
So, there would be this one master table which will have information about public figures and anybody could search it and reference it in any way they want.
Here is an example:
The following is a list of problems that needs to be solved:
-Explanation of how people could use this table needs to be made
-How to browse the table without "getting in the way" of other people (Google recently introduced a "filter view" feature, for example).
-How to add information to this table without the danger of corrupting existing data
-How to correct information in the table
-How to remove private information that shouldn't be part of the table
-How to expand the columns of this table to augment its usefulness
-How to differentiate between people with the same exact name (perhaps, use wikipedia-style "specifiers"?)