Help:Categories

This article discusses what a Wiki category is, how to apply a category to an article, how to create a new category, and how to change an existing category.

Wiki Categories

Wiki categories create links at the bottom of a Wiki that lead readers to a list of related articles. When you apply a category tag to the bottom of a Wiki article, the Categories page is updated with that category’s page. The category’s page will contain an alphabetized list of all articles that use the corresponding category tag.

Category Mark-up

In order to place a category tag on an article, include the following mark-up at the bottom of your article:

 [[Category:CategoryName]]

For example, to create Category:Templates:

 [[Category:Templates]]

In order to place multiple categories on a page, use a new tag for each category.

Creating a New Category

Each time that you create a link to a category that doesn’t already exist, a link to your new category page will automatically be created in the Categories page. However, the page itself will not be automatically created. In order to create the page for your new category, use the following steps.

To create a new category page

1. Put a category tag using the name of the category you want to create in an article. The category you created will have a red link.
2. Click on the link. This will take you to the uncreated category page.
3. Put text, such as “Use this category to identify Wiki articles about…”, into the Editing field.
4. Click "Save Page".

Now that you have created the category page, the page will automatically update with links to all articles with a corresponding category tag.

Editing and Moderating Categories

Changing category names is appropriate when the old category name is too broad, too narrow, or in-accurate.

To change a category name

Currently, there is no way to automatically change a category name. In order to move all articles in one category to a new category, you must do so manually.

Note: If you have moved the contents of one category to another category, and wish to prevent the original category from being used again, you may want to create a category redirect.

To create a category redirect

If a category page has no articles that use the corresponding category tag, it will no longer be linked to from the Categories page. However, it will still exist. If other users create new articles that use the corresponding category tag, the page will be linked to from the Categories page again. In order to alert other Wiki authors to the change and to prevent further use of the corresponding category tag, you will need to put a Category Redirct on the old category page.

In order to create a category redirect, use the following steps:

1. Go to the empty category page, and go to the Edit tab.
2. Delete any existing text from the Edit field.
3. Place the following mark-up in the Edit field:

 {{Category redirect|new category}}

For example, to redirect from Category:SSL to Category:SSL/TLS:

  {{Category Redirect|SSL/TLS}}

To create a subcategory

Sub-categories may need to be created to keep a large category more manageable. If a sub-category needs to be created, each of the articles belonging to the new sub-category will need to be manually relabeled.

In order to create a subcategory, use the following steps:

1. Create a new category with the name you want to use for the subcategory.
2. At the bottom of your new category, put the parent category tag.

For example, to create a new subcategory named Themes for the parent category of Customizing ZWC, I would create a new category named Themes and put the following tag at the bottom of the page Category:Themes:

[[Category:Customizing ZWC]]

Once you have put the parent category's tag in the subcategory page, the subcategory will be listed as a subcategory in the parent category page.

Creaing a Link to a Category

Normally, to create an internal link you place double brackets around the name of the article you are linking to. (E.g. I can link to this article by typing Help:Categories.) However, using this technique with a Category page does not create a link to the category; instead it tags the article as belonging to that category. (E.g. Typing adds the Help category tag to the bottom of this article and adds the article to the Help Category page, but does not create a link in the body of the article to the Help Category page.)

To create a link to a category, you must place a colon before the name of the Category page you are linking to. For example, to link to the Help category, type:

[[:Category:Help]]