Due to popular demand 
I have split out the category suggestion feature from the SelectCategoryTagCloud extension and created the CategorySuggest extension. This extension fills a major gap in the extension list of Mediawiki. By default users have to add categories by adding wikitext to the article (e.g. if you want to add the category “Information Development” to a page, you need to add [[Category:Information Development]] somewhere on the article page). This clearly has some disadvantages including
- lower usage of categories because users don’t know the syntax
- duplication of similar sounding categories because users don’t know that a category already exists
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. Here is a screenshot of the user inteface:
This is version 1.0 and there are still a lot of features and enhancements that can be added. We hope that by providing this initial release we can encourage other users of Mediawiki to test, use but also to help with the further development of the extension. The extension homepage includes a list of TODO’s which would mean a great enhancement to the base functionality.
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