When I started the Burg, 22 years ago, my original idea was to take smaller excerpts from news stories to follow what was going on with the Wonderful World of Terror. I registered the domain Thugburg at the same time, thinking I could keep track of the Bad Guy players and their ever-sifting organizational fronts.Silly me. One person only has so much attention span. That's why we invented division of labor in my younger days, back in the Upper Paleolithic.
I still think it was a good idea. I covered the organizational thing and the big turban tracking, kinda sorta, with the translation routine. (Thank you, Righthaven, you rat toad sonsabitches!) It's not a good solution to me though. For years we've had the presentation of events half-hidden under big yellow repetitive blotches. It's not even databased; it's a great big brute force Javascript include.
There's gotta be a better way.
My thought at the moment is still half-manual. Build a Postgres table with the orgs we're interested in. Then fill in the organization's membership as it pops up. That still leaves us with the problem of associating the name and the org. We had separate org and name links before and that didn't work well. For one thing, we're also interested in non-WoT names, like who's the UN Human Rights head cheese? Who's the head of UNRWA?
Then we'd somehow have to tie Obits into it (Thank you, Seal Team Six and IDF!) We should probably also be able to generate an on-demand report on who died that we've been interested in during a specific time period.
I've only got vague ideas on how to do any of these that will work and be convenient to mods. I think those are the only two major constraints. Anybody else with any good ideas?