Spreadsheet to Wikipedia

[Kennin]

I've taken on a huge but quite fulfilling endeavour! 

I work as together with another buch of volunteers on a huge project. 
It's a tabletop fantasy RPG translation project. 

Within this project we have a huge glossary in a spreadsheet. 
This glossary is beginning to be really tough to work with, as we have about 10.000 items by now. 

What do I want to do? 
 

1. Create a typical MediaWiki page on our server. 
2. We'll use the MediaWiki first of all as a real Wiki (with some limitations) but also as a CMS for the entire site. 
3. We'll want to load the Spreadsheet - as a tsv or csv - up to the wiki. 
4. In that wiki, we'll have several kinds of hyponym-hyperonym. 
   For example
   1. Main category: geography > Planet: earth > continent: North-America > country: USA > State: California > County: Orange County > Santa Ana (Town)
      In this case we have category planet, subcategory continent, sub-subcategory country and so on. Last category is "town", describing the item itself.
5. There also will be items that fall in several categories. 
   For example: 
   1. Main category: geography > Planet: earth > continent: South-America > countries: Peru - Brasil - Bolivia - Colombia - Ecuador > Amazonas (River)
      In this case we have category planet, subcategory continent, sub-categories all the countries the Amazonas runs though. Last category is "river". 
6. We want to create a template, a form where people just have to pick and chose categories from drop downs, and only will have to fill out what is not in the drop downs as well as the main text. 
7. New pages will have to be checked and approved before they will be uploaded. 

Now the questions:

1. How do we make up the spreadsheet? Because there will be for example geography and its subcategories, there will be animals and its subcategories, there will be famous people and its subcategories and so on. How are we going to do that? 
2. How do we make the form?
   1. How do we only show the dropdowns in that form that are applicable?
      For example:
      1. Josh wants to make a new entry for the Amazonas. He starts the form and immediately choses: "geography" as the main category. That means that the category "plants" and all of its subcategories won't be accessable, but only the subcategories that are valid for "geography". Then he choses "planet earth" and only continents on earth will be shown in the drop down list and so on.

I know, it's quite something, but any other way it will at the end be WAY more work on the longer run. 

[HSRobinson]

You can create nested subcategories and you can import CSV as per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Data_Transfer but to automate this for 10K items is complicated and you would most likely need a developer for that.

Your request about a custom form that shows the nested categories as dropdowns is also doable. Part of it is here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MsCatSelect but I am uncertain if that's what you need.

[Kennin]

I will surely check those out! 

And we can't afford to hire a developer for this, unfortunately. So we'll have to find a way to properly do this. I'll have to learn how to do it! There's no way around that!

[SteveMann]

Have you considered converting the data to a table?

I had an XLS file with a bit over 100 rows and four columns.  Here is a site that does the conversion for me.