Help:Categories

A category is a tool to label and group together pages that refer to similar topics. The category feature automatically indexes these pages on to a single category page, which is useful for browsing and as table of contents.

Together with links and templates, categories help provide structure and aid navigation on a wiki.

Adding categories
In a wiki with the rich text editor, there are two ways to add categories to an article:
 * From article pages:
 * At the end of the article, you can add a category without going into full edit mode. Click "Add category" and type in the name of the category you want and press enter. As you type the name of a category, suggestions will appear with any currently existing categories that match your input. After you have entered one category, you can type another, or save your additions.


 * From edit pages
 * At the end of the edit box is a separate section for adding and editing categories; it functions the same as the article page box.



Things to note

 * A page appears in a category when a Category tag is added to that individual page. You cannot add pages to a category from the category's description/index page.
 * You can create new categories just by typing a new name.
 * Pages can belong to more than one category, by having multiple category tags on the page.

Using Wikitext source mode

 * To add categories in wikitext, such as in Source mode or on wikis without the rich text editor, you can simply type, and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.

Using categories

 * All categories will appear at the bottom of an article page, in a "Categories" box. Clicking the category name will take you to a Category description page which will list all articles and subcategories contained within that category.
 * Please note, category description pages are not designed to carry general content - they do not get counted in article statistics, and will not be found via many Special pages.

How do I create subcategories?

 * A category becomes a subcategory when you edit the category description page to add a Category tag for a "higher level" category. There is no limit to the number of subcategories a category may contain, or to the number of levels of categories.

How do I link to a category page?
To create an internal link to a category page without placing the edited page into the category itself, you must put a colon before the word

Can I redirect a category to another category?

 * No - while redirecting a category is technically possible, it will not re-classify articles properly. What you can do is add a notice (such as Wikia:Template:Category redirect) to inform users that a different category name should be used.


 * You may then delete the old category once all the pages it contains have been edited to use the new category. However, if anyone might unknowingly try to re-create the "wrong" category, the template should remain in place for ever.

Where can I see the currently used categories?

 * You can see a list of all currently used categories for each Wikia at Special:Categories. This list also displays how many pages are within each category.
 * You can reach this page by clicking the word "Categories" at the beginning of the box at the bottom of any categorized article, or by clicking "Special pages" in the sidebar.

Extensions

 * Special:CategoryTree is an alternate way to display the contents of a category. The extension also adds the ability to expand subcategories on a category page, allowing you to see further subcategories. It can be transcluded in other pages. See Media wiki for details.
 * Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki's help page on categories for detailed information on categories.

Next steps

 * Templates
 * Infoboxes
 * Tables