While working on the MYSTlore MediaWiki installation, I went through various extensions that might prove useful sooner or later. Here’s one that sounds neat. Says the author:

[The manual approach of adding categories] 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

‘fraid I can’t try it out – or install it, for that matter – on MYSTlore yet, because CategorySuggest requires MediaWiki 1.10, and we’re still on the 1.8 branch (I’ll get around to it… eventually). Can’t find a third-party wiki that has it to try it out on either, though. But I can certainly think of several occasions where I had to manually look up what exactly an existing category on MYSTlore was named, or whether one of the kind I was about to create already exists.

As to how much this extension helps in practice, connection lag plays a big role. As with all such live fetches of results: the longer it takes for suggestions to be fetched, the more aggravating the experience becomes, and the less of a benefit the extension actually offers. But I’m intrigued, and I would like to try it on an actual installation.