MediaWiki extension to support taxonomy by genus and species

I'm trying to build a MediaWiki-based website for a very specific purpose. Namely, I would like to create a field guide for a specific group of animals (reptiles and amphibians). Since the people I would want to generate content on the website aren't necessarily techies, I'd like to make things as easy and painless as possible for contributors.

Now, in most groups of animals, taxonomic designations are fluid, and change all the time. As an example, consider the following:

A species used to be called 开发者_高级运维Genus1 species1. It was then called Genus2 species1. As of now, this species has been split into several species, say Genus2 species1, Genus2 species2, Genus2 species3, etc. In the worst case, anything about the nomenclature and classification of the species could change, including, but not limited to, the species being moved, split or merged with any other species.

For users, these changes should be transparent. That is, on typing in http://url_of_wiki/wiki/Genus1_species1, they should automatically be redirected to the lowest taxonomic group (in this case Genus2) that is non-ambiguous. Essentially, if a page is redesignated (moved, split or merged), I would like to automatically create all new pages and redirects required.

I should be able to implement this as an extension quite easily. However, I've read the MediaWiki documentation on extensions, but haven't been able to figure out just what part of MediaWiki it would be best to target.

So, the question is, is this type of extension best implemented as a parser extension, by adding new tags, or a user-interface extension, or a combination of the two (a user-interface extension backed by a parser extension)?

Nice challenging problem! If it were up to me I would solve it in a different way:

• use page level for genera and
• sub page level for species.

This will automatically take care of renaming since redirects will be made.

Alternatively: - use page level for species and - categories for genera.

Then use an if pagename template (see Wikipedia example) to change the category based on the page name.

Or possibly combine these methods.

(See also Wikis and Wikipedia)