Help:Categories
This Help page contains technical information on how to categorize pages. See Fanlore:Categories for information on Fanlore's categorization protocol, sitemap, and specific guidelines for categorising on Fanlore. See Help:Fandom Categories for information on how to create and use fandom categories.
This wiki allows you to categorize pages by adding one or more category tags to the text. Adding these tags creates links at the bottom of an article. These links take you to the list of all pages in that category, making it easier to browse related articles.
Contents |
How to Add a Page to the Categories
To add an article to a category, type the following at the end of the page you are editing:
[[Category:NAME]]
where NAME is the name of the category you want to add. Any number of category tags may be added to the page; the page will be listed in all of them.
Many templates include categories automatically.
Protocol for categorizing articles
If you're not sure where an article belongs, see Fanlore:Categories. See also the help pages about specific types of articles.
Try to list the categories in order from general to specific, e.g.:
[[:Category:Fan Communities]][[:Category:Highlander]]
This will be displayed as: Categories: Fan Communities | Highlander
Articles may be cross-categorized into any categories that are relevant.
As a general rule, you should not include parent categories.
Adjusting the Category Alphabetization
You can also specify an additional SORT parameter that dictates where the page will appear alphabetically within the category. Use the following markup:
[[Category:NAME|SORT]]
For example, to list names in a category by LastName, FirstName; the article Francesca Coppa could be categorised:
[[Category:People|Coppa]]
Note that we used 'Coppa' as the sort parameter. Without this the page would be listed under 'F' for 'Francesca Coppa', instead of under 'C', which is more useful. When listed in the category the article will still appear as Francesca Coppa.
To change the way an article sorts in every category it appears in, add this text to the page:
{{DEFAULTSORT:SORT}}
For example, to sort The Holmesian Federation under H instead of T, add this text:{{DEFAULTSORT:Holmesian Federation}}
A way to sort the article under the correct letter without the namespace is
[[Category:Help|{{PAGENAME}}]]
Note: the SORT parameter does not affect how the page title is displayed within the category listing, just how it is ordered. In the above example, the link to this page will still be 'Help:Categories', and not 'Categories' as you might expect!
Linking to Category Pages
To create a link to a category page, type
[[:Category:NAME]]
If you were linking to the Category Page for Help on Fanlore, for instance, the link would look like this: Category:Help.
If you want to display alternate text for the link, type
[[:Category:NAME|TEXT]]
Here is an example of the same link to the Category Page for Help on Fanlore as above, but with alternative text: MediaWiki Help Index.
Categorize Categories
Categories themselves and other uploaded files like pictures can be categorized exactly like normal pages. It is useful to connect the article-categories with categories already in place to establish connections and hierarchies. To this end, after saving the article, follow the category links at the end of the page to see if the category is already in place, and if not, categorize them until you connect them with an existing category.
Protocol for categorizing Categories
Categories should "only" be categorized with the category immediately above it in the hierarchy.
For example, Category:Fiction Writing should "only" be categorized under Category:Fan Activities.
All categories should be categorized, bar the top-level ones (see Fanlore:Sitemap).
Please speak with the Wiki Committee if you'd like to create a new category.
Moving Categories
Categories cannot be easily moved like other pages. For this reason, category names should be chosen carefully.
For those with admin privileges, the easiest way to move categories is to create the new page, delete the old one, and then change the tags in each member of the category (manually or with a bot). However, this loses the page history. This is not a huge problem when categories are used only for navigation, but when a wiki is structured differently and the category pages contain significant amounts of text, this is undesirable.
Moving with revision history
However, with some effort category pages can be moved together with the full revision history by using the Special:Export and Special:Import functions.
