Eli,

I've just had the same problem: in my case it was reference data about an article. It is bizarrely enough the task I am just working on. I have two motivations for answering: one is that this approach works and it answers your questions, the second is to perhaps get some feedback on the approach and see if it can be done in a more elegant way.

I solved the problem by having a single page that shows the reference data. I has to use the extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UrlGetParameters to allow access to the url parameters and my own parser extension to get the data out of the file system. I suspect you could use an existing extension if you wanted to get data out of a database.

In my case the page I have created is http://www.softwarefm.org/wiki/DependsOn. This page takes two url parameters "groupId" and "artifactId" (this section of the wiki holds data about maven artifacts). In your case you could just pass in the primary key for the article. At the moment this page looks like

{{#dependsOn:{{#urlget:groupId}}|{{#urlget:artifactId}}}}

Currently the parser extension does formatting which is obviously A Bad Thing(TM), so I am teasing the view out of the "dependsOn" parser extension into the DependsOn page.

To link to this page I am using a template at http://www.softwarefm.org/wiki/Template:LinkToDepends, which holds

<noinclude>The order of parameters is LinkText, GroupId, ArtifactId.</noinclude>

<span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:DependsOn}}?groupId={{{2}}}&artifactId={{{3}}} {{{1}}}]</span>

I use this by

{{LinkToDepends|Link To Depends|myGroupId|myArtifactId}}

I hope this was helpful

regards

Phil