[Mediawiki-l] Categories and displayed name.

[HumanCell .org]

On 06/04/06, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale at gmail.com> wrote:
>        [[Category:MyCategory|MySortKey|DisplayThisInstead]]
> which would be consistent with the way pipes are used to parameterize
> Image links e.g. [[Image:MyImage|thumb|Cool caption]]
>
> It would also have the benefit of not breaking existing pages which
> don't use this new syntax.
Yes, I agree that is a clear advantage - don't want to go breaking
existing pages.

> On the other hand allowing alternate presentations of category links
> raises some consistency issues that might make it inadvisable.
Well I'd rather not, but here's why I think it is necessary... and if
anyone can think of a better way of doing the following I'd be
grateful if you could let me know.

 - I have a database of 10,000+ chemical compounds and would like one
article per compound.
- Compounds are related hierarchically e.g. "methane" is an "organic
compound" which in turn is a "molecular entitity" (cf
taxonomy/ontology)
- Compounds can have ugly names like "(+)-cis-3,4-dihydrophenanthrene-3,4-diol"

Current approach:
 - each compound is a category with three parts:
   1) a definition of the compound and its properties
   2) a list of sub-categories
   3) links to super-categories
 - make the article title a unique identifier (e.g. CHEBI15386) to
avoid the ugly punctuation
 - make category links meaningful to users
[[Category:CHEBI15836|Organic aromatic compounds]] replaces the ID
with more meaningful text

Any thoughts?  Are the issues just specific to my case or are there
more general issues at stake?

Cheers.

PS. Just found Semantic MediaWiki which looks very interesting.