Mediawiki's concept of first uploading a file and then linking to the file inline from an article is not user friendly and not intuitive. Many users want to simply attach a file to an article. We need to provide both. The purpose of this extension is to create a "Attachments" extension to Mediawiki which allows user to view existing attachments and upload new attachments to a wiki article.

• As a user I would like to upload a file and link to the file inline from an article like a regular HTML link so that other users can read throuhg a paragraph with link inline (existing functionality, which shouldn't be changed)
  
• As a user I would like to attach a file (any Office document) to a whole article so that I can't have to edit the inline text to link to the attachment
  
• As a user I would like to see all attachments to an article either below the article in a separate area besides categories or as another tab besides article and discussion so that I can quickly get an idea of what files are attached.
  
• As a user I would like to attach a file in an asynchronous way (like Gmail attachments) so that I can continue with editing or viewing other articles.
• As a user I would like to attach a file either when I am in the traditional Mediawiki text editor or when I am in FCKeditor. Alternatively, the upload/attachment interface is completely separate from the editors.

Technical Considerations

This could be implemented as a tag extension (e.g. <attachment>filename.doc</attachment>). For any file to appear as an attachment to a page, the user only needs to assign the attachment, similar to how you specify a category ([[Category:name]]. By convention, this should be done at the end of an article. On edit the extension could then parse out all attachments and display them in the separate attachment/upload section. And on save, it saves it back to the article content (see SelectCategoryTagCloud? which works the same way). And for viewing an article a new hook needs to be implemented to display all attachments in a separate attachment/upload section.