Help:Category

From ConspiracyWiki

A category is a software feature of MediaWiki. Categories provide automatic indexes, that are useful as table of contents. Together with links and templates they structure a project.

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]]

This lists the page on the appropriate category page automatically and also provides a link at the bottom of 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, depending on the skin (the bottom for Monobook, the upper right corner for Standard). 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).

Executive 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 "Category:Help pages". When a page belongs to one or more categories, this information appears at the bottom of the page (or in the upper-right corner, depending on the skin being used).

The page of the category contains text that can be edited, like any other page, but when displaying the page, the last part of what is displayed is an automatically generated, alphabetical list of all pages in that category, in the form of links (in fact ASCII order, see Help:Special page).

For a complete list of categories, see Special:Categories. Individual wikis may have their own top-level categories, such as Category:Categories in ConspiracyWiki.

New categories can be created and edited in the same way as any other regular page, but when displayed, an automatically generated, alphabetical list of all pages in that category appears at the bottom.

You can assign a category to a page simply by adding "[[Category:categoryname]]" to the page's wikitext source. Substitute the actual name of the category in place of categoryname.

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.
• 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."
• list of images with thumbnails (how many there are is not counted); the first 20 characters of the image 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 subheaders per letter, it has not even a header itself and visually seems to fall under the header of the previous section "Articles in category ...", even though in counting the articles, images/image pages are not considered articles).

To create a category page, you must 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.

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.

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).