Need help determening feasibility: Bible Translation Wiki

I do not have any server admin experience and I just need a place where I can post my project and knowledgeable people can tell me if it is feasible. In short, I need to know what plugins I'd need to do this and I also need advice on how to host this (to keep costs down.)

My Project

My goal is to create a Wiki-based project where Biblical Language scholars (such as professors) can come together to work on a pair of new translations of the Bible in English. I want to produce a literal/word-for-word type translation and also a dynamic/smooth translation, both available in some sort of Creative Commons license that enables anyone to use them. I want this to be accepted in the academic world (unlike Wikipedia) so I need to restrict edits to only those who are authorized to do so (and those people would be scholarly people.) I need support for multiple sets of footnotes (one, perhaps using numbers, to show textual variations and another, perhaps using letters, to show alterate ways that a particular word/phrase could be translated.) I also need to be able to export this project so that it can be used (keeping the distinction between the two translations in tact and also maintaining all the footnotes.)

Potential exporting needs:

Daily or weekly "builds" so that 'outsiders' (those who are not part of the group of academics working on the project) can see out progress and help to "open beta" the project (but in read-only mode.)
Conversion into a format that could be used with e-document readers (for distributing the text.)
Exporting in a format that can be used on websites like www.biblegateway.com
Someday printing this project as a parallel Bible that has the "literal" translation in one column and the "dynamic" translation in the 2nd column

Of course, I also need to find out about ways to host all this and that sort of thing. I am a college student with a dream, not a financier. Perhaps I could scrape together a server and keep it as some sort of VPN intranet or something so that I don't have to worry about web hosting fees. I generally need to keep costs (including maintainance costs) to a minimum since I'll only be funded by donations (likely primarily from my own pocket until I can get the word out and perhaps get some donors.) I need to know what sort of server would I need to host project (in terms of CPU, RAM, HDD, etc.)

Keep in mind that this is my first real step down the path of this project - I have not talked with any professors or scholars yet. At this point, I'm seeing if the idea is even feasible. It just seems to me that if we can get people worldwide to work on translating projects like Wikipedia that surely we should be able to produce a free-to-use translation of the Bible that is of high scholarly quality.

I think that TWiki:Plugins.FootNotePlugin might be able to help with the footnotes (but I don't know if it can support two sets) and PublishPlugin should be able to do the exporting, but I don't know if it could integrate with a footnote plugin.

Sounds feasable. Maybe you wanna look at some PDF generating extensions like all those GenPDF... or ToPDFPlugin. Concerning the hardware: depends a little bit on how many users you will have on your box: rule of thumb, if its less than 50, you get away with any old computer.

-- OliverKrueger - 15 Sep 2009