Hello

I'm currently working for a team at the local University here in Bern. The team wants to create of chronology of major events in their subject and has decided that Mediawiki ist the tool to accomplish their goals. I'm implementing the application and help them to understand and use the product.

Unfortunately, I've got stuck with a major problem:

Every event should be categorized with one or more category out of ca. 35 predefined ones. As far as I have learned, categorization only works for articles/pages, but not only for specific elements on a page. That's a huge conflict since my customers would like to have a chronological list on one page, like [1], although preserving categories for each event.

I already thought about transclusion, but this gives me headaches since this feature needs a lot of manual work (e.g. creating the page, editing the content, going back to the chronology list, transcluding the item). Another problem would be proper naming of subpages - should we use a real title (events sometimes are hard to summarize in a few chars), the date (can be a year, a date or even a range like a period) or IDs?

As far as I realized this really is the only way to go to have a) categories and b) a listing of all events on one single page. Transclusion might as well have a huge impact on server performance if the list reaches a certain level, right?

What do you suggest? Did I overlook something?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Christianity

Many thanks for your help! Kind regards Mario