Social Glass

Mediawiki is the popular, open source wiki application that powers wikipedia. Many organizations run mediawiki on their intranets including Avenue A Razorfish. One of the issues with the out of the box version of mediawiki is its categorization (or tagging) feature. Users are required to type the text “[Category:” followed by the category, then “]” (”[Category:design]”, for example) on the wiki page.

While this does not seem overly complicated it, becomes very difficult for users to reuse categories as there’s no feature on the edit page that shows them which categories have already been used. As a result, we might end up with two categories “design” and “designs” that should be the same.

A colleague of mine, Andreas Rindler, has solved this problem with a mediawiki Category Suggest extension.

CategorySuggest provides a Google Suggest like functionality to the edit page of articles. A separate “Categories” input box is added below the article page. When a user starts typing the name of an existing category, the extension retrieves a list of existing categories from the Mediawiki database and suggests matches to the user. The user can either type the name of a new extension or pick from the list of suggested categories.

Click over to his blog post describing the extension for a better overview.