Building a Bilingual Wiki Platform for 30,000 Historical Documents

The situation

An academic publishing project maintained a large archive of historical and legal documents on WordPress, in English and French. The founder wanted to turn a static archive into a research platform: precise search across tens of thousands of documents, filtering by category, section, speaker, and historical date, and a controlled wiki model where vetted contributors could edit documents from the front end. The existing site stored everything as undifferentiated posts and tags, which could not support any of that.

What I did

Across multiple funded phases I rebuilt the platform:

• Migrated and normalized more than 30,000 records with custom scripts, cleaning inconsistent legacy data. When the host’s hard limit on database import size threatened the final deployment, I optimized the database footprint until the import fit, preserving all content.
• Built a custom bilingual search engine on custom post types and taxonomies integrated with WPML, with accurate French-language filtering, prioritized placement for key report categories, and corrected historical date searching.
• Developed a front-end wiki editing interface with revision history, restricted by role so contributors could edit documents but never touch site pages.
• Implemented a contributor registration workflow with administrative approval and vetting fields, and replaced confusing external authentication with a clean on-site login.

The outcome

The project now runs as a working bilingual research platform with community editing under editorial control. The engagement itself is part of the evidence: what began as a marketplace project became a direct relationship that has continued for six years, through follow-on phases, restores, syncs, and reviews, and remains active today.