Help:Categories

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Using categories is an excellent way of indexing and organizing information on TSSWiki. The software we use MediaWiki contains simple code that can be used to automatically place articles and even categories into categories.

For a list of all categories contained within TSSWiki, see: Special:Categories.

For our policy on categories, see: Project:Policy/Categories.

Contents 1 General Guide 2 Formatting Basics 2.1 How to include an article in a category 2.2 Creating subcategories 2.3 Creating a new category 2.4 Setting category sort keys

General Guide

Categories are useful ways of grouping similar information for easy reference. However, categories created simply for the sake of having a category link are a waste of effort. Although there are notable exceptions, if a category only contains a few pages, it's probably not worth having. Likewise, if any one category starts getting more than about 30 entries, it's probably time to look at creating sub-categories for it.

Formatting Basics

How to include an article in a category

To include an article in a category, edit the article and include the following text anywhere on the article's page:

[[Category:Category Name]]

For example, [[Category:Game Play]] adds an article to the category named "Game Play" category.

Articles, including categories, can belong to more than one category. The categories to which an article belongs are displayed in a fixed location (the bottom of the page), regardless of where in the wikitext they are written.

Creating subcategories

Categories themselves can belong to a category. These "sub-categories" are listed on top of regular articles in the parent category page. For example you could edit [[Category:Game Play]] and add the link [[Category:The Game]]. The Game Play category would then be a subcategory of the The Game category. It would then appear in the sub-categories list on [[Category:The Game]].

Creating a new category

Creating a new category works just like creating a new article. Just add an article to a category normally, click on the red link (blank page) created at the bottom of the page and add a description of the category. Then you can start adding pages to it.

When a category has no descriptive text, links to it become Edit (red) links, which makes the category somewhat hard to use. Avoid this by at least having some statement in the category page. A one-line description about what kinds of topics included in it should suffice.

Setting category sort keys

Normally, articles are sorted alphabetically in a category page. If you want the article to be positioned by something else, you should use the following link form: [[Category:My category|sort key]], where sort key is the value to sort by.

For example to add an article called Albert Einstein to the the category "People" and have the article sorted by "Einstein, Albert" ("Einstein" is the first sort key and "Albert" the second), you would type [[Category:People|Einstein, Albert]].

The sort keys are case sensitive, so [[Category:My category|Foobar]] is sorted before [[Category:My category|foobar]].

To make pages inside namespaces (i.e. "Help:", "TSS - World of Xaltoria:") sort by the page name rather than "H" and "T", you can use [[Category:My category|{{PAGENAME}}]]. This will keep working even when the page is renamed.