Forum:Categories Problem

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Hey everyone. I have a problem with categories. On my wiki cardguide wikia I have a lists of card types and rarities on every expansion set page. I want to link them to a category, for example on Day 0 Tactical Pack Agendas to the category Agenda (24 TCG) and so on.

By character it's doing good, but the other categories are not. And if I go to the source mode, their made the same way.

• 11 Agendas
  *46 Characters (23 CTU, 23 Insurgent)

So what's the problem, with the non-character categories ? vuurvosje 12:41, August 28, 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify, is the "problem" you are experiencing that the category links show red?

If so, this is because you have not created those category pages yet. Placing a page in a category does not automatically create that category. The category will still show as a broken link until you actually go to the category page (for example, Category:Agenda (24 TCG)) and click the "Create" button, and then click to "publish".

(And for the love of god, someone please make sure Wikia sees this...) --Gardimuer ^{ ʈalk } 19:45, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Gardimuer! This helps me alot! But what exactly do you mean with "And for the love..." ? vuurvosje 19:52, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

It was an inside joke/expression of the black pessimism of my soul. Regardless, I suggest you read a bit more about how categories work: MW:Help:Categories. Gardimuer ^{ ʈalk } 20:08, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this, Gardimuer. You've identified a new bug -- categories are appearing as blue in the category area but red in the article area. Intended functionality was that a link should be blue in either situation. This bug is understandably confusing (sorry, vuurvosje!), and I've filed a ticket to get it back to the intended functionality (while still allowing for personal customization through CSS). Thanks again for letting us know, and sorry about the black pessimism of your soul. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 22:46, August 30, 2011 (UTC)

Ugh. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 31 Aug 2011 4:04 PM Pacific

Woah woah woah - Dopp please do not change the links to non-existent categories blue, that is surely the last nail in the coffin of common sense. With this, links to categories containing no articles or images whatsoever will be blue. How can you justify that with the "non-existent categories have some content" argument? I agree it's confusing having categories at the bottom blue, and links to them in articles red, but I think you know the answer to that (hint: change all links back to red if the categ doesn't exist)--Acer4666 15:46, September 2, 2011 (UTC)

100% agreed with Acer - Tagging Staff Needed (again).    ǝsʞpɐןǝ  (message wall)  16:00, 2/09/2011

Good luck with that. I applaud your attempt to reason with the unreasonable. This is why I just said, "Ugh," instead of Acer's more eloquent response. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 3 Sep 2011 9:11 AM Pacific

To add to my above comments, what makes this change even worse, is that links to non-existent categories don't show up special:wantedcategories, meaning in order to realise the links are wrong we have to root through special:wantedpages, mixed in with all the actually red links--Acer4666 11:30, September 8, 2011 (UTC)

You're kidding, right? We got the non-existent categories back to red in the article area, and now we're beign told that was a bug? Seriously? Does wikia not understand how disastrous this whole thing is on a globally available platform? People from England have one idea of how to spell words that is not the same as people from America. Without some kind of alerting system in place to tell users which of the two spellings is preferred by a wiki, the category system will be considerably less useful. It is not a bug that a category which has not yet been created shows up in red. It is merely a way to keep organizational/organisational order amongst the many colors/colours of the English language. Seriously, wiki, please go to tardis:Tardis:Spelling policy/user-fixes.py, see how many hundreds of words we have to patrol, and then tell me that it wouldn't be a Really Good Idea to have some way to try to let people know that the tardis:category:organizations doesn't exist, but tardis:category:organisations does. czechout ☎ ✍  fly tardis  23:44:25 Thu 08 Sep 2011 

Earth to Wikia. Please stop screwing up basic MediaWiki functionality that is understood worldwide. See also: Forum:Removing categories in source mode with wide edit box. As long as source mode still works like Mediawiki works elsewhere then most people will stay with Wikia, but if basic MediaWiki functionality changes too much then more people will leave or stop editing. --Timeshifter 00:04, September 10, 2011 (UTC)

Hi everyone, I'm chiming back in because there have been several links to this post today. I realize that our discussion about this feature change has been scattered across a handful of technical updates, forum posts, talk page conversations, and Special:Contact requests, and that this has made it hard to get a clear view of what's going on. We're actively trying to improve our communication methods, and we'd appreciate your input on this survey for what we can do better.

Let me wrap this up by clarifying a few key things:

We have listened to and discussed all of the feedback we have received from you on this issue. Almost all of the points you have raised were known and discussed internally before the original decision was made. We've taken this into consideration, and elected to keep with the change, for reasons that we recognize you may not agree with -- mainly that it makes categories easier to use in newer wikis and by newer users.

You can continue to adjust your personal CSS by changing .newcategory to red, and we hope you can find a way to work with this change. We've discussed all of the details of this issue extensively, and it does not seem constructive to keep debating it. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 21:57, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

It makes categories easier by making it take no effort to set up categories. It's so easy I can mistype something and it will still exist! 00:26, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

A compromise needs to be reached on this. There is absolutely no way that this will ever die down without one. Staff need to give up on the idea of consistency and realize that some wikis are inherently different and need to be able to do things differently. Any wiki should be allowed to change categories back to red as is the default in MediaWiki. I have seen some wikis send messages to all users telling them to put the red link code in their css. As I continue to say, consistency is not always a good thing, and on wikis, it tends to be a bad one.--GodPray  00:31,9/20/2011 

Dopp youer response makes me so angry I cannot begin to express what I feel. the condescending naturee with which you treat my arguments (while not responding to the points I bring up) makes me really, really angry. The fact you have "listened to my points", reached some sort of secret consensus with the staff, and are unwilling to share that with the community, shows how much the community matters to wikia in points like this. RESPOND TO MY ARGUMENTS PLEASE.--Acer4666 00:39, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, i think we may have one misunderstanding: our intention was to change all links to categories that contain pages blue, even if page descriptions do not yet exist. Categories that lack both descriptions AND pages should have remained red links in articles, and they didn't. Another bug (which probably went unnoticed because, frankly, this seems like a much less common use case than the other situations we've been discussing, doesn't it? If it's common, can you hook me up with examples from several wikis, so i can push this fix through faster?).

Let's clear this up with a chart. Here's what we want:

	Has Description	No Description
Has Pages	blue link	blue link
No Pages	blue link	red link

Regarding the issue of Special:WantedCategories not updating, can you give me a specific example or two for us to research? (I'd like to figure out if it's not working at all, or if it's delayed due to caching issues.) Thanks. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 17:08, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Right, if it's a bug, then ok, but you said it was intended functionality. Special:wantedcategories is a non-issue if the bug is fixed. As for examples, here's degrassi, a couple from tardis, here's one from community central. I'm sure I could find them on most big wikis, if thats what you need to fix it.

I notice your use of the word "pages" (ie plural). I suggested a compromise where setting the bluelink limit to be more than one page in it, as I'm sure you'll agree a category with one page in is clearly not a "category" in any sense and is most likely a mistake. So, if that is what you want, I would be happier to hear that. However, I guess you mean "1 or more pages". Am I right?--Acer4666 17:30, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Isn't the actual red link logic (the Wikia's Staff compromise) a complete unconsistency? --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) ^-WikiDex 18:16, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

Are categories with neither pages nor descriptions supposed to be red links everywhere or just in the article namespace? If they should be red everywhere, I would say the bug went unnoticed because Wikia's intent was unclear -- if you delete the category page ("description") of an empty (no articles) category, Special:RecentChanges shows that deletion with a blue link to the now-removed category. I've been ignoring that behavior because I thought it was intended that links to categories always be blue, even though it looks rather odd in that case. (If it's a bug just in the article namespace, then I have no examples to present.) --The Krit 22:09, September 20, 2011 (UTC)

I just hope the Special:MyPage/wikia.css "fix" continues to work and I can ignore all the confusing cases. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 21 Sep 2011 8:29 PM Pacific

Thanks, all -- I've raised the priority on the bug that links to categories with no descriptions and no subpages should be red, and hopefully it will be fixed soon. Other changes should remain, including the fix for personal CSS view. If any other bugs or issues arise, please send them to us via Special:Contact. --Dopp (help forum | blog) 18:55, September 22, 2011 (UTC)