Help:Categories
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Categories
Another way to find articles is to use categories. A category is a software feature of MediaWiki. Categories may be used to group related pages together. The resulting category pages provide automatic indexes to sets of pages; these indexes can serve as useful tables of contents for the wiki. Together with links and templates, categories help provide structure to the wiki. Categories can be applied to pages much like tags in other online applications. Categories do not form a strict hierarchy or tree of categories, since each article can appear in more than one category, and each category can appear in more than one parent category. This allows multiple categorization schemes to co-exist simultaneously.
Category use
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 you listed. Pages can be included in more than one category by adding multiple category tags.
For example, if you are creating a set of pages about OCLC then you might place them all in the OCLC category. Simply edit the page and type the following at the bottom of the page:
[[Category:OCLC]]
The result will be a link at the bottom of the page to the OCLC category, which is located at http://staff.lib.ucdavis.edu/wiki/Category:OCLC. All pages which have been listed in the OCLC category will show up here.
Setting up categories
All categories are in the "category" namespace. You can start a new category simply by starting and editing a new category page:
[[Category:New category name]]
and adding descriptive text to the new category page. This category page serves as a description of the category, and provides an automated list of pages in the category. Pages that belong in the category will now show up here automatically when you tag them with the category [[category:new category name]]. It is possible to categorize pages before you set up the actual category page, but it's nice to add descriptive text to the category page so that other people know what you meant it for.
Subcategories
Categories can have subcategories. For instance, [[Category:Classes]] could be a subcategory of [[Category:Instruction]] -- simply tag the [[Category:classes]] with the [[Category:Instruction]] category tag. When you visit the [[category:Instruction]] page, you will see [[category:classes]] listed as a subcategory.
Linking to a category
To link to a category without actually including the page you linking from in the category, type a colon in front of the category: [[:Category:Instruction]].
Finding categories
- Find all the current categories here.
