Re: TECH: Is there a Mediawiki developer in the house?

On 10/1/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> So what is it about linguistics as a topic that you think will require
> modifications to the internals of MediaWiki?
The short version is that I want to take a general-purpose application
and turn it into a platform for a more special-purpose application. MW
provides a bunch of really useful features and functions that I don't
want to reinvent from scratch, but not all of them are well suited for
something that would be a collaborative database (rather than a
collaborative encyclopedia).

Instead of maintaining (what looks to the untrained eye like) a single
rich-text field for every article, I'd be looking to maintain a number
of multi-field "document types" for different kinds of data.

MW already has infoboxes; my plan is to enforce constraints such that
articles of a specific "type" must have specific infobox-like named
fields, and from those specific types additional processing can be
done to autogenerate other information. The original rich-text field
would remain for note-making,

In this case, "types" might include "Family", "Language",
"Orthography", "Phoneme", "Sound Change", "Corpus", "Lexicon",
"Cognate", and such things. Building a way to enter and display
interlinears (probably based on that cunning CSS that was linked a
while ago), would be best handled at an application level, too, I'd
wager.

Some of this is in Kura, and I'll be examining Kura too, now that I
know what I'm doing a bit more compared to the last time I tried to
fiddle with it. Some of it's in Shoebox, too. What's missing from both
those tools is the suite of doodads that make collaboration (whether
loose or tight) easy and foolproof -- which MW has in spades.




Paul

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