[Mediawiki-l] rendering navigation through categories / bottom-up classification / clustering

Fri Aug 19 13:19:46 UTC 2005

Dear all,

I've installed MediaWiki and wish to render a navigation through the
categories.

As a first simple experiment I tried to transclude the categories page
into a template as described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Transclusion_costs_and_benefits

i.e I've got a template for a floatbox, and acccording to the
description on the page above this code should work:

{| border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" width="40%"
style="float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:0,5em;
background:#f3f3f3;"
|-
|{{Spezial:Categories}}
|}

unfortunately it doesn't work. It works with articlespace and other
namspaces but not with the 'Spezial' or 'MediaWiki' namespaces.

Well in any case, this would just have been a hack - I might have also
remodeled the categories page with a css stylsheet to shape it to my
needs but there would be limits to that. For my purposes I' will have
to generate a duplicate of the categories page with modified markup.

In the simplest case the navigation would render showing the
categories. By mousing over those categories I would get a submenue
showing all pages classified under that category.

* If I do opt for this simple scenario, Is there an easy way of
modifying the output markup of the categories page?

The second scenario is clustering of categories: In classifying the
Individual articles/pages I generally would wish to avoid use of
subcategories and would rather prefer to use multiple categories for
each page. I take those categories and pass them on to a clustering
function to build a hierarchy. (my users are willing to do this
classification à la del.icio.us)

In that case the questions are the following:

* how do I pull out the categories pass them on to a clustering
function and pass the output as a new page with my own markup back to
MediaWiki?

I plan to do the clustering as a MediaWiki extension. However Since I
already have very good clusteringsoftware running on a different
server, and am therefore also considering passing on the data to and
fro.

* is there some standard way of passing on from and and pulling in
Data back into Media Wiki applications?

I'd be glad if all or some of this has already been somebody else's'
nightmare :)) if not,  I would be glad for any hints or starting
points.

Cheers from Cologne 

Gustav Vella