Automated alternatives to creating hierarchical categories in mediaWiki manually? - automation

Question

I want to start a mediaWiki based site, but rather than manually adding categories and subcategories I want to add them in an automated fashion, where I provide something like an xml file and the bot/script/algorithm/... goes through the list and creates the categories and subcategories with their pages automatically.
There are no pages yet, but I want to start with a clean set of categories, helping users to sort the pages.
I found the pywikipediabot, but I can't figure out how to use it for my purposes - it seems to only work for categories of existing pages. Would you use pywikipediabot for creating hierarchies of new categories and if yes how? Can an xml file be used as a template?

Answer 1

I found a solution to my initial problem of creating categories in bulk, however I don't mark the question as closed, if you know a better solution - please post.
MediaWiki has an import functionality. With your admin account go to
http://yourMediaWiki/index.php/Special:Import
This allows you to choose to import an xml file, which has to follow a certain structure: see here
For a category with the name "Test Category" and the text "Category Testing", you have to create a 'page' element like this:
<page>
<title>Category:Test Category</title> <!-- Name of the category, don't forget to prefix with 'Categroy:' -->
<ns>14</ns> <!-- 14 is the namespace of categories -->
<id>n</id> <!-- identifier for category -->
<revision>
<id>16</id> <!-- number of revision -->
<timestamp>2013-02-10T22:07:46Z</timestamp> <!-- Creation date & time -->
<contributor>
<username>admin</username> <!-- Name of user who created the category -->
<id>1</id> <!-- ID of the user -->
</contributor>
<comment></comment> <!-- Comment about the category. Can be left blank -->
<sha1></sha1> <!-- sha1 hash can be left blank -->
<text xml:space="preserve" bytes="1">Category Testing</text> <!-- It seems it doesn't matter what you write into the bytes attribute. -->
</revision>
</page>
If you want to create hierarchies of categories just add the parent category tags into the text element. Say the category should be part of the 'Parent Category' category then the text element should look like this:
<text xml:space="preserve" bytes="1">Category Testing [[Category:Parent Category]]</text>

Answer 2

If you are able to get pywikibot up and running, then you can use the its Category class. Main entry point on Github search for class Category(Page).
Categories in Mediawiki are basically standard pages but in Namespace 14. To include any page in a Category - including a page which is a category - in the wikitext of the page you include [[Category:<The-Category>]]
So you can do something like this
>>> import pywikibot as pwb
#Your site will be different than this
>>> testwiki = pwb.Site('en','test')
>>> catA = pwb.Category(testwiki, 'testCatA')
>>> catA.namespace()
14
>>> catA._text = u'[[Category:testCatB]]'
>>> catA.save()
Page [[test:Category:TestCatA]] saved
Now you have a page Category:TestCatA which is a subcategory of Category:TestCatB.