Ok, if you're gonna do something like this I just have a few warnings about doing it in a wiki:
1) A wiki, especially mediawiki is freely editable, you'll have no control whatsoever what people enter and you'll get stuff like edit wars with people trying to protect what they like best.
2) A template system doesn't work, people don't follow it. Aka welcome to edit hell. (Go to wikipedia and you'll find hundreds of different ways to do the same thing.)
3) Even if you get said template system to work if you ever want to change it you have to change ALL pages.
4) In a wiki style system you tend to get several different versions of the same data. There are ways around this but it's not easy to manage, stuff has a tendency to get messy and lost, causing extra work.
5) Wikipedia is not id based, it's string based, meaning if someone adds a character with a misspelled name all references to that page need to be edited rather than all pages updating automagically.
Wiki is fast and easy to start but it's not fast and easy once it gets somewhat big. I'm not sure you understand the enormous amount of extra work a system like wiki can generate.
Just imagine having to mod anidb, in a wiki style system. Just check ANN how much data you can get for a few animes.
Oh and for making a site separate from anidb.
You then get problems with information duplication. Aka, you two places to update anime titles, images, descriptions, producers, urls, release dates, genres, anime type, maybe even episode listings and god knows what I skipped.
Plus, when you make two sites you get people pulling in different directions, there'll be stuff done on the new site that should really be done on anidb.
Why not spend the effort to learn perl and help exp instead? I'm certain he'd accept help, especially if you really want to help.
And if you can code php you can learn perl, there are horror stories out there for certain but it's just another scripting language just like others out there. Once you get used to a language it's just like any other (well, mostly
).