[thelist] CMS/Wiki

[Peters Gj (PSYCHOLOGY)]

Dear The Listers,

I am facing a challenge and would appreciate some advice.

I am not a professional web-worker, but have been subscribed to The List
and lurked for quite a while now from hobby-interests. I have recently
installed a very basic and barely customized Drupal installation, and
that about sums up my skills (very basic html, css and php, almost no
sql).
I am now facing a situation that calls for a solution that may need to
be slightly more powerful (although perhaps Drupal can handle it).

I work with a group of researchers in psychology and health promotion
(that is my actual job). This groups has the ambition to develop a
website that provides an overview of the knowledge about how to develop
health promotion interventions (i.e. how to help people stop smoking,
exercise more, etc). An example of such a technique would be something
called a 'fear appeal': placing 'scary text' or 'scary images' on packs
of cigarettes[1]. This website would ideally take the form of a
moderated wiki. So far I think I would be able to manage by installing
Mediawiki :-)

However :-)

There is also research on the effectiveness of these techniques.
Ideally, such studies would also be added to the website and tagged with
one or several techniques (e.g. "this study studies the effectiveness of
fear appeals"). And ideally, each technique's page would list all
relevant studies, and summarize their results, so that an overview page
of all techniques can show the average effectiveness of each technique.
For example, the fear appeal page would show a list of studies that
studied the effectiveness of fear appeals, and in addition, it would
integrate (quantitatively) the results of these studies[2].

I am not sure to what degree open source[3] wiki engines and CMS's
(CMF's :-)) are equipped to deal with this degree of 'interrelation'
between pages. Not to mention the 'calculation' part (this would be
cherry on the pie, so I can live with leaving it out).

Perhaps all wiki engines can do this, and if so, I'm sorry for wasting
your time . . .

Thank you in advance and kind regards,

Gjalt-Jorn Peters

-----------------
[1] There is evidence that this particular technique doesn't work; I
name it here because it's recognizable. If you're interested, drop me a
line, I'm currently conducting a review on this topic :-)
[2] This math-part I could handle in PHP
[3] No financial means, of course . . .