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

I suspect you could accomplish most of what you want with appropriate
macro and template definitions, without having to modify the MW code.
So IIWY I'd dive into the admin doc before the API.
    I'm currently swamped with the work that I'm paid for, but if you
do wind up going into the code I'd be happy to answer e.g. PHP
questions as they come up.


On 10/1/07, Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...> wrote:
> 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
>

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>