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mediawikitableofcontents

Mediawiki: I need a Table Of Contents for the entire wiki

I administer my own company internal wiki using MediaWiki. I like MediaWiki because many people are already familiar with it having used Wikipedia. Also, it was a joy to configure and I didn't run into a lot of issues, not being that familiar with PHP. (So I'm not necessarily looking for another solution, like DokuWiki...)

My requirement is that the opening page be a listing of all pages, broken down alphabetically by category - much like a Table of Contents for the entire wiki. It would look like this (on the "Main Page"):

Category 1
    Page A
    Page B
    Page C
Category 2
    Page E
    Page N
    Page X
    Page Z
Category 3
    Page Q
    Page V

Each page gets the category assigned to it. I know about the Special:Categories page, but that only shows the categories, and one must drill down (follow the link) to see the pages within that category - therefore, I cannot see multiple pages/multiple categories.

I have seen Extension:Hierarchy, but this does not fit my needs because the "Table of Contents" has to be edited rather than being auto generated by declaring the "parent" or "category" on each page itself.

Is there already existing functionality for this for MediaWiki? (I understand that as the wiki grows, so too will this Table of Contents page, but that is okay.)

Alternatively, I know about the MediaWiki API. I can create a server-side process that:

  1. Does a MySQL lookup for all pages and their categories
  2. Sorts them
  3. Uses the MediaWiki API to generate this Table of Contents on the Main Page

And I can run this process periodically. I am up for the challenge, because I am a programmer and it is an interesting exercise, but why reinvent the wheel if I don't have to?

Solution

  • CategoryTree is an option. Now, a challenge here is that MediaWiki categories are not hierarchical. In other word, you can have category loops (A>B>C>A). Also, one article can show up in any number of categories, and articles can be without categories. The only thing that has to be done manually is to put <categorytree>Category Name</categorytree> for each category on the home "Table of Contents" page. Granted that new categories are not likely going to pop up a lot, this will not be a terrible issue. However, one solution for this inconvenience is to just put all your (top-level) categories into Category:Categories and then display that category via the extension (see the depth and hideroot parameters).

    Hard to use, but wikistats produces an HTML representation from an XML dump, see e.g. MediaWiki.org categories.

    CatGraph is another analysis tool, even more complex it would seem (but I've not tried setting it up for a wiki of mine, unlike wikistats).