I'm in the process of building two (non-commercial) sites. Both are not strictly Wikis, but I think MediaWiki would be a great platform for them due to its enormous flexibility and the elegance of the whole concept.
These projects, however, require features that might not be available or difficult to implement in MediaWiki. I have browsed the documentation, but the following questions remain.
So - how would you approach the following problems/situations:
1) Ranking: Is there a mechanism to let users rank a page and display "top ten" lists of pages based on this ranking? I'm aware of "Popular Pages", but explicit ranking would be a welcome addition (see next question).
2) Collaborative Filtering: Is there a way to give users a list of pages "similar" to those they have given a high ranking - based on the rankings of other users?
3) Multilingual Templates: If I want to present multilingual content: Can I have language-specific templates, i.e. is there a way to tell MediaWiki that it should use template "Content_IT" when the content of the page is in Italian?
4) Importing and exporting pages: How can I (mass-)import or export pages as e.g. plain XHTML files or in CSV format? For example, I might want to add a huge DMOZ-style categories tree from an external source.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Documentation:Administration says "[...] you'll have to write appropriate scripts on your own. As far as we know, there are no general-user ready-to-run scripts available for this purpose." Does this means I have to fiddle with the actual database? Say it ain't so ... :/
And finally, a slightly exotic wish:
5) Mail Gateway: Is there a way to for users to request pages from the server via E-Mail (e.g. by putting the topic you are looking for in the subject line), so these pages are sent back to them via mail as plain text messages?
(I'm aware this is far from the core functionality, but it would be useful for the project I have in mind. Maybe someone can suggest an add-on to do this.)
I am not a developer, but maybe you can point me in the direction of people or technologies who can achieve what I am looking for.
Thank you for your help.