While I agree with Chenier that the wiki history can be interesting in itself, I don't think I misunderstood you. If a concern is about database size, the wiki isn't the way to go. That's not me saying it's a bad idea to use the wiki, it's just a statement based on how the wiki functions compared to the game.
I guess the best question here, for Anaris, is where he thinks things should be. Game vs Wiki vs Something Else.
Adding descriptions in game is easy. It's just text loaded in specific spots with a page to submit it.
Adding newspapers in game would be doable. They're mutliple text boxes associated to each other, at the minimum. At the maximum, the game keeps track of who has what editions or what guild runs them and you can only read those you have.
Adding realm histories would be a considerable amount of work. It's a lot of new code that would need to go in a lot of different places. I'm pretty confident in saying that, based solely on the amount of places I have to do event triggers in M&F. That's also a HUGE database addition, one I'm certain would see the size of the game's database significantly increase.
As for your black box concept, yeah, that should be the goal of anything like that. The game already has a similar implementation for the forum. Ideally, you just pass a few variables to a php method and it just does everything as necessary. Once the methods are all built, include a use statement where you need it and presto, it's done and good.
The impression I get, is if you're willing to contribute to the game's development, they're not likely to turn you away. To code for BM, the bulk of what you need to know is HTML and PHP. There's some JavaScript in places, and while the game is slowly getting away from it, still a number of SQL queries in places.
