MediaWiki and Databases

So I'm working for a Material Science research group for a summer job, and they want me to set up a wiki to centralize data and experiment results. I've taken exactly one Java class.

So, I set up a MediaWiki site, but they want to connect the data together, along with citations.

For example, Silicon has two properties they're interested in, "hole mobility" and "electron mobility". So on the wiki article on Silicon, they want to list Silicon's hole mobility and the electron mobility, but on the page for electron mobility, we want a list of many different elements' hole mobilities. When they update the hole mobility on the Silicon page, they want the number on the Hole mobility page to update as well. They will also want a citation attached to each data bit, so they'll know what circumstances and where that information came from

I believe that this will require a database system, and was wondering if you guys could point me in the right direction. I've just started to learn MySQL, and well frankly and slightly overwhelmed. Is MySQL too powerful of a language for this? Is there a simpler way to implement website-wide changes?

Thanks yall.

How on earth did you even get the job. Is there no CS/SoftEng class in your town?

MediaWiki actually sucks.

Its only purpose is to run Wikipedia. It's huge and heavy, and the code is nasty and convoluted, and the developers only care about anything you have to add or request as long as it doesn't affect how Wikipedia runs. Its full-text search is so highly defective that nearly everyone who wants to search for something on Wikipedia will just use Google instead. The wiki syntax is a horrible, nasty pile of hacks, it's monstrously incongruent (for one example of many, why are internal links double-brackets with a pipe separating target and text, but external links have to be single brackets with a space separating them?) and often it's easier or even necessary to fall back to writing plain HTML because it's either inflexible or simply lacking syntax outright for something. And you don't even get to write proper HTML, it's this bastardized "cleaned" version that strips out useful things like image links (this requires installing an extension, despite half of all websites in the world using an image as a link at some point or another), and integrating logins with other web services is nothing short of painful.

That aside, if I understand you right, you seem to be describing the relations between one article and another, and this is exactly what SQL is made for. (Although I would never choose MySQL for anything, ever.)

So you'd have a table of (page_id, citation_id), and (citation_id, text); then you look up the page's id in the former table, collect all your citation ids, look up the text for them and fetch all the other pages that those link to, and dump it all out at page render time. Of course all of this can be done in one query with a few joins, it's a bit messy but entirely straightforward.

You will have to write >Silicon's hole mobility and the electron mobility
In a template and include the template in pages you want to be updated. Also, MediaWiki is overkill.

>>5
If you can't program, just use one of the off-the-shelf apps, there's plenty open source wiki's, and you need minimal programming knowledge to set them up.