Help talk:Categories

moving advanced information to talk page for now:

Can I move a page into or out of a category article?
Ideally, no. The software won't allow you to use Special:Movepage to move a page into or out of a category, due to the way they are designed, but there is a way around that in a simple 4 step process.


 * 1) Goto Special:Export. Enter the name of the article or category you want to move in the bigger box. Uncheck the Include only the current revision, not the full history box in order to retain the full editing history. Click Export and save the file somewhere convenient, like your desktop.
 * 2) Open the file, preferably with Notepad++, which can read XML files. Otherwise, opening the file with Notepad will be messier, but still workable. Locate and change the contents within to the destination location. Save the file.
 * 3) IMPORTANT: Make sure the destination page does not exist, delete it first if so. Then navigate to Special:Import and upload the file.
 * 4) Move the talk page to the new location and delete the appropriate redirects, where applicable.

redirecting categories
"Can I redirect a category to another category?" "No"

This is a very large confusing lie. Yes, you can. You can redirect a category the exact same way as redirecting any other page, or any place you can edit text, even Image: pages can be redirects too.

What it does not do is redirect the category entries into a different category, and does not at all stop people from adding pages to the category with redirect.

--Uberfuzzy 10:06, 3 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, it doesn't do what users expect, and they shouldn't do it. Yes, technically it can be done. No, they shouldn't do it. Kirkburn (talk) 14:47, 3 December 2008 (UTC)


 * So we should encourage people to use Template:Category redirect, which gives a link to the right place and makes it less likely that others will blithely and ignorantly go on putting pages in the deprecated category. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:30, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Not sure what you mean by that template? If it's one that tells people category articles should move, I think that's something that should be wiki-specific and shouldn't be part of any default set. I wouldn't want to encourage any needless extra categories - I believe it's better to have wrong red link categories than wrong blue linked ones because at least they're more readily identifiable on an article. Kirkburn (talk) 15:58, 26 January 2009 (UTC)


 * http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Category_redirect is an example adapted from the Wikipedia standard. Could easily be generalised, removing the sentence about bots so that anyone putting a page in a wrong category will see that it's wrong as soon as they look at it and will see what's right. If they are the sort of people who don't bother to look at categories, the fact that it is red on their article may not be enough to inspire them to look. Eventually someone interested in the article and in categories will follow the link; if it is red, they may (as I said above) blithely waste time creating a fresh wrong category page. The backup, if nobody looks at the wrong category, is that "maintenance" people can check the tracking category to find non-empty category redirects (which is surely more efficient than looking at every single page to see if it has a red cat link?). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:12, 27 January 2009 (UTC)