Last modified: 2014-02-14 16:35:23 UTC
While MediaWiki's search and some extensions can list articles in namespaces (and extensions like Dynamic Page List, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DPL , can list articles linking to other articles, among many other different combinations), MediaWiki's categorization system doesn't have any built-in automatic categorization. I am proposing something more user-friendly than http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategoryHook which requires setting complicated PHP settings in LocalSettings.php (I think; it doesn't really state where they go) instead of an easier, more intuitive method of using a special page, article, or whatever.
Er, can we have an actual proposal then? You haven't explained how this "automatic categorization" would work.
Well, if you look at how CategoryHook does it, that's a start at a proposal. I'm just looking for a more user-friendlier interface besides having to dork with PHP files (which I think MediaWiki has far too much of already for end-users to deal with). Basically, all namespaces would, by default, be categorized by their pluralized name (configurable, of course) as I outlined on CategoryHook's talk page. Of course, even the "default" auto-categorizations would be configurable but these seem to make the most sense to me. As new namespaces are created, MW could "sense" this and automatically add them to the auto-categorization rules. I think this functionality would be enough for an initial implementation. More complicated rules based on templates could come later (or simply added onto as they are created by users--an auto-categorization rule database of sorts).
No clear idea of what this would do.
What don't you understand about it, Brion? Check out CategoryHook for basic functionality.
"Something more user-friendly" than writing custom plugin code seems too vague a description to be working from. :)
Huh? Again, check CategoryHook...I'm not a programmer (never claimed to be one either). It's not vague; the code exists but just needs to be made user-friendly per the above description (which isn't vague at all). If you need more specific details, ask a specific question and don't just brush it off as a vague "vague" classification.
The extension seems to be a basic wrapper for adding categories to pages based on some condition; the example provided uses a regular expression match to look for a given parser function, and adds pages to a specific category, presumably for maintenance purposes. The problem here is that this is not particularly user friendly, but what you haven't really told us is what you would like us to do about it. Be very specific. What sort of "conditions" would you like the user to be able to add? Regular expression matching is one possibility, although there are likely many other potential criteria, which would be a little easier for end users to specify. Ultimately, I'm not very convinced of a need for arbitrary conditions leading to automatic categorisation; most wikis tend to have specific categorisation schemes usually relating to manual categorisation (inserting "[[Category:Foo]]" into pages about "Foo"), and relating to categorisation coming from templates, e.g. an "infobox" about a person causes categorisation in "People", or "People born in 1979 who grew up to become famous singers only to be tragically killed in car accidents...". I find it doubtful that end users could develop suitable conditions for such things; this seems much more likely to be something that individual projects will want to set up globally, if at all. It also strikes me that constantly changing automatic categorisation based on some conditions would make it difficult to see why a page is categorised in some way, and difficult to suppress that categorisation.
Not being a programmer, I can't be as specific as you'd probably like. Basically, again, I just want an easier way to add auto-categorization (auto-cat) rules within MediaWiki without having to dork with PHP files to do it, preferably as a "MediaWiki:auto-categorization" or "Special:Autocat" page (preferably via a form). While regexp support would be nice for more advanced users, more common wildcard (and basic search syntax ala Google) support would probably be preferred for most users. As for auto-categorization suppression, a magic word (like "__NOAUTOCAT__") could be added to a page.
Use case still missing! Please tell us what you want to *achieve*. * If you need to tag pages for immediate action, use AbuseFilter extension. * If you want to act on pages automatically, use pywikipediabot.
> I find it doubtful that end users could develop suitable conditions for such > things; this seems much more likely to be something that individual projects > will want to set up globally, if at all. Eep²: If you could come up with *specific* examples to show that above argumentation is wrong, please do so.
Unfortunately closing this report as no further information has been provided. Eep²: Please feel free to reopen this report if you can provide the information asked for in comment 9 and if existing tools/extensions (mentioned in comment 9) are not sufficient. Thanks!
