Help:Category
Best way to give finishing to the article is to categorized it nicely, so everyone can find it whenever they visit an appropriate category. And to categorized your articles is as easy as one, two & three.
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Summary
Each of the pages in the Category namespace represents a so-called category, a kind of grouping of related pages. For example, this page belongs to". When a page belongs to one or more categories, this information appears at the bottom of the page.
You can too assign a category to your page simply by adding "[[Category:Category name]]" to the page's editable text source. In order to reference a category within a page as a normal wiki link (without adding the page to the category) prefix the link name with a colon. For example: [[:Category:Not in this category]]
Putting an item in a category
A page in any namespace can be put in a category by adding a category tag to the page (by convention, at the end of the page), e.g.:
[[Category:Category name]]
Substitute the actual name of the category in place of Category name. To be specific, in order to add an article called "Albert Einstein" to the category "People", you would edit the article and add "[[Category:People]]" (no quotes) into its page source somewhere.
This lists the page on the appropriate category page automatically and also provides a link at the page to the category page, which is in the namespace "Category". Pages can be included in more than one category by adding multiple category tags. These links do not appear at the location where you inserted the tag, but at the page margin in a fixed place.
Category tags may be placed anywhere in the article, although they are typically added to the end of the article to avoid undesirable text display side effects.
Category links are displayed in the order they occur in the article, unlike the automatic ordering of lists in the category pages themselves (see below).
Category page
A category page consists of:
* editable text
* list of subcategories; how many there are is also displayed; if there are no subcategories the header and count are not shown. With the Category Tree extension, installed on Wikimedia, one can click "+" to see the subcategories of a selected subcategory.
* list of pages in the category, excluding subcategories and images; the number of items in this list is called the number of articles; if there are none the header is shown anyway, and "There are 0 articles in this category."
o From MediaWiki 1.5 the namespace prefix is no longer shown.
o A raw list without links or headers can be obtained with Special:Export.
* list of image and other media files with thumbnails; the number of files is given and the first 20 characters of the file name are shown, with an ellipsis if that is not the full name; also the file size is shown. As opposed to the second and third section, this section does not have sub-headers per letter.
The items in the lists all link to the pages concerned; in the case of the images this applies both to the image itself and to the text below it (the name of the image).
The first and second list each have a header for each first character, dispensed with if there are no entries for a header. If no headers are desired, use sort keys all starting with a blank space (see also below).
On Meta and Wikipedia a redirect to a category shows the editable text only. To get the full page after being redirected, use the link "Image", or "Category", respectively.
On Commons a redirect to a category gives the full page, but not the subcategories and pages in the redirect page (if that is also a category).
Creating a category page
To create a category page, one can e.g:
- follow an automatically created link to the category page. Putting this code on any page creates the link.
[[Category:Category name]]
or:
- add a colon in front of the Category tag when you set up the page-creation link, to prevent the software from thinking you merely want to add the page you are working from to the category:
[[:Category:Category name]]
Placing the above text on working page will create the link you can use to edit your category page, and will display the link text as a normal wiki link without adding the page to the category.
Subcategories
Creating subcategories takes only a few additional steps. Adding a category tag to a category page makes the edited category a subcategory of the category specified in the tag.
First create a new category page for the subcategory the same way you would make a regular category. For example: create
[[Category:Soccer]]
Then go to the newly created category page and edit it. Add the category tag for the parent category (e.g.
[[Category:Sports]]
) to the page. In this example, the Soccer category would then be a subcategory of the Sports category.