Mediawiki automatic “list of __” with descriptions?

Question

list of foo pages on Wikipedia are manually updated. Can I automate that on my own mediawiki?

I want a automatically generated list of foo page with a table that contains a name and description of all entries from a single category foo.

I could transclude the contents of the Category:foo page onto the list page, but this does not mean I get descriptions. I could use labeled section translusion but this is only useful for single pages.

Can I combine the two (with an extension or otherwise)?

Answer 1

Semantic MediaWiki is one way to do that.

Answer 2

Looks like with DynamicPageList3 you can show the

• Whole Article or
• Contents of Certain Sections (Identified by headings) and
• Truncate title or contents to a certain maximum length

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With Extension:Scribunto, you could write a custom Lua module and query mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory and fetch the the description of the article somehow -- depends on where and how you store the description.

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Extension:CategoryTree can probably be hacked to include the first n words of an article or whatever your description consists of.