Help:Categories

From CGWiki

Categories are extremely useful to organizing wiki pages. As the name suggests, categories are used to link to pages which are similar in content or theme. An article about "Batman" might fit into a category of DC Comics titles, Fictional detectives, Justice League members, or even a Batman category.

Linking an article to a category

Let's say you have an article about n00bs and wish to put it in the category of Internet neologisms. Once you're done with the article, you simply put this at the end of it:

[[Category:Internet_neologisms]]

At the very bottom of the page--you'll see it under the edit section if you're just previewing--there will be a box at the end of the article linking it to the category of Internet neologisms. Easy, huh?

Things get just the tiniest bit more complicated when you're trying to put an article from a namespace into a category. You've just finished writing up your comic at Comic:Super_Fantastic_Punch_Out and want to put it in the Humor category. Do not simply write this:

[[Category:Humor]]

If you save the page with this and go to the humor category, your comic will appear alphabetically under C for Comic and not S for Super Fantastic Punch Out. To fix this, the correct way of linking to a category from a namespace is like so:

[[Category:Humor|Super Fantastic Punch Out]]

Now your comic will be appropriately listed under S.

Creating new categories

Creating new categories is exactly the same as creating new articles. You can either follow a link or create your own via URL. Once your category is created, you can go through and add it to articles where it is appropriate.

Categories should be created with care! We do not need a category for "Users from San Diego California" or anything specific like that. Ideally, you should be able to organize at least a few existing articles into the category and still be flexible enough to accomodate more.

Creating subcategories

Creating subcategories is the same as creating categories except when editing your subcategory, link it back to its parent category. For instance, the category of Rated Web-14 is a subcategory of By Rating and links back to it. When one category is linked to another as a subcategory, it automatically shows as a subcategory when the parent category is visited.

There is no limit to the number of subcategories which can be created, but the same care which goes into creating categories should be given to subcategories. Consider if your subcategory has an extremely narrow definition which may not be useful in organizing current and future articles.