[Mediawiki-l] Categorization tips and tricks?

[Luis Casillas]

As somebody involved in an effort to simultaneously (a) develop a lot 
of content, (b) develop a good categorization scheme for it, I've so 
far come to the following conclusions about the categories feature in 
MediaWiki:

1. It's far, far better than nothing.  Please remember that I believe 
this as as I criticize it below.

2. It's far too much work to recategorize an existing, substantial body 
of articles.  And in fact, it's even more work to rename a category, 
keeping the same articles under it.

Why is this so?  Here's what conspires:

* You can't rename/redirect category pages.  If I create a bunch of 
pages with [[Category:Foo]], and later I decide that the category 
should be called [[Category:Bar]], I can't just move [[Category:Foo]] 
to [[Category:Bar]].  I have to go to every single article in category 
Foo, and edit each one manually to have the new category.

* The software almost silently accepts categorizing pages under 
categories that don't exist (more precisely: whose category page is 
empty).  The only indication one's done something wrong is the link 
color in the category-- which my users happily ignore.  (Hell, even I 
have problems always looking to check if I got it right.)  It would be 
nice if this behavior were customizable.  (Yes, and the proverbial day 
that I have time, I might even try it myself-- it's not the motivation 
that I lack.)

* There is no way to batch recategorize pages.  I can't go to a 
category index or similar page, check a set of pages, select a category 
name to move them to, and have them all be recategorized as such.  I 
imagine such a feature could be less than trivial to get under the 
current implementation: it would require doing a text 
search-and-replace over the text of every article to be recategorized, 
is my guess.

Any tricks, conventions, practices, etc. that any of you have found to 
work around these problems (short of "get your categories right from 
day 1" or "run an open site edited by thousands of users in their idle 
time") is welcome.

--
Luis Casillas <casillas at mercedsystems.com>