On Jul 19, 2007, at 2:32 PM, Christopher Hickman wrote:
The [[Category:convention_name]] tag is slightly
unintuitive, and it requires editing your user page and
typing in a code which requires balancing brackets.
As I mentioned above, making a convention a Category
is somewhat unintuitive. While I think it will probably
have the desired behavior, it feels a bit kludgy to me.
It could just be an issue of nomenclature, though.
The best way to do that is the same way that wikipedia does their user
badges. That is, as a template that *includes* the category, so
instead of
having to manually add [[Category:GenCon]], you'd put
{{attends_GenCon}} in
your user page and get a little badge that shows that you attend on
your
user page and have your user page automatically added to the GenCon
Category
page.
You may even be able to set up a link on the convention page that
says "I attend this convention", which takes you to the edit screen
for your user page, with that particular template filled in.
As Marc says, the wiki isn't ideal because it isn't searchable as
easily as an actual database, but it does allow you to get things
like this up and running a lot faster than writing the code,
integrating it with the existing system, keeping it running, keeping
it ported forward to new systems, etc.
By the way, I am too busy with everything else (including keeping the
wiki software up to date and running) to really spend much time
setting this sort of thing up on the wiki, but I encourage everyone
else to experiment with and help set up these really useful kinds of
categories, templates, and general organization of the wiki.