Sending and receiving data from the wiki
You can think of the wiki as a very large plain-text database. The Mediawiki API provides calls for reading and writing pages (and metadata about pages). The AddDataRows widget is a simple example that uses Javascript (and jQuery) to add rows to a wikitable.
If you write an extension in PHP, you have even more direct access to the underlying data... but to maintain good page history (attribution and changelog) you will probably still want to work at the "page" level.
JimTittsler (talk)
