Hello Robert,
By stepping out of the wiki model we can embody each of the assertions as its own data object. Assertion, creator, votes, links, the whole nine yards, stored as a living object in the database. This solves the metadata problem and allows you to automate the entire process. My design correlates to Wikibates the same way that dynamic pages correlate to static ones.
I'll have to look deeper into OpenCyc. A quick glance suggests that it could be a very powerful back end resource, and may even provide a good data model to work with.
For a flexible data model, consider looking at RDF [1]. When programming in Java, a tool such as RDFReactor [2] can give you an object-oriented access. A similar tool exists for Ruby [3].
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ [2] http://rdfreactor.ontoware.org [3] http://activerdf.m3pe.org/