[Mediawiki-l] mediawiki as combined text/data store?

[graham]

Hi,

I'm a relative newbie with mediawiki and before I rush into something
I'd appreciate some advice as to how practical this is.

I want to use mediawiki to hold a catalogue of electronic resources
(journals etc) that a library has access to. One page per resource. The
end user would be able to search through categories of resource and each
page would give the user a description of the resource, explanation of
how to use it etc. So far, completely normal wiki.

But I have additional data about each resource I would like to store in
each page (for example, configuration settings for a proxy server for
that particular resource). This data would not be visible to the
standard user, but would be entered by the same person entering the
visible text and would be visible to that person/group. The data would
be extracted by a bot at intervals to generate configuration files
directly or update an external database. Even better would be if the bot
could also populate the pages with some of this data.

Is this straightforward to do with mediawiki? I had a quick look at the
API and it doesn't look like it's really geared to extracting
user-defined chunks of data, but I could well be wrong. I don't mind
doing some coding (and obviously will have to do some for the bot) but
don't have a huge amount of time to spend on development. A pre-existing
plugin that does what I want would be nice!

Thanks for any advice

Graham