Help:Categories

MediaWiki allows you to categorise pages by adding one ore more category tags to the text. Adding these tags create links at the bottom of the article which take you to the list of all pages in that category, which makes it easy to browse related articles.

For a list of categories already created see Hierarchical Categories or All Categories.

How to add categories

To add an article to a category put the following at the end of the page you are editing...

[[Category:{Name}]]

where {Name} is the name of the category you want to add it to. Any number of category tags may be added to the page - the page will be listed in all of them.

There are two ways to define how the page is sorted. You can use the template

{{DEFAULTSORT:XXX}} 

or you can also specify an additional {Sort} parameter that dictates where the page will appear, alphabetically, within the category. This is achieved by using the following markup:

[[Category:{Name}|{Sort}]]

So for example, to add this page to the 'Help' category, you would use:

[[Category:Help|Categories]]

Note that we used 'Categories' as the sort parameter. Without this the page would be listed under 'H' for 'Help:Categories', instead of under 'C', which is more useful. Other situations where you might want to use the sort parameter is when you have articles about people that are titled as FirstName LastName but within the category you want them listed as LastName, FirstName.

The easiest is to use the DEFAULTSORT since that will effect all the categories on the page.

Another way to sort the article in the correct letter without the namespace is

[[Category:Help|{{SUBPAGENAME}}]]

This is extremely helpful when using templates which include a category tag.

Note: the {sort} parameter does not affect how the page title is displayed within the category listing, just how it is ordered. In the above example, the link to this page will still be 'Help:Categories', and not 'Categories' as you might expect!

Linking to Category Pages

To create a link to a category page:

[[:Category:{name}]]

If you were linking to the Category Page for Help on MediaWiki, the link would look like this: Category:Help

If you want to display alternate text for the link:

[[:Category:{name}|{alternate text}]]

Here is an example of the same link to the Category Page for Help on MediaWiki as above, but with alternative text: MediaWiki Help Index

Categorize Categories

Categories themselves and other uploaded files like Pictures can be categorized exactly like normal pages. It is useful to connect the article-categories with categories already in place to establish connections and hierarchies. To this end, after saving the article, follow the category links at the end of the page to see, if the category is already in place and if not, categorize them until you connect them with an existing category.