LXF Wiki:Category
From LXF Wiki
Categories are a brilliant way to organise and find information on a Wiki.
Suppose you have several pages all covering different aspects of the LXF Wiki. You can create a Category called "LXF Wiki" and add it to each of these pages. When you browse to Category:LXF Wiki it shows you a list of all the pages in that category. Fantastico!
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Adding categories to a page
Mark a page like this:
[[Category:Help]] [[Category:LXF Wiki]]
and look at the grey bar at the bottom of the page. See, it says Categories: Help | LXF Wiki. Click the LXF Wiki link and presto! a page full of links to other pages in the LXF Wiki category. Fantastico!
Which category to choose?
Check out Special:Categories. This lists all the categories that have been created to date. If you think you need a new one, just add a link in your page to the new one. When you click the new (red) link, it will give you a page with an Edit tab so you can create the Category. Type in a few words of explanation, and Save page.
Naming Categories and pages
Page names are usually in the singular, say Console. This is because a user might be asking, "What is a 'console'"? (For more about naming pages, including exceptions to the rule, see TBD).
Category names are usually in the plural, as in. This is because the category page provides a list of consoles (and related pages).
Changing a page's position in the list
Sometimes you want a page to be listed under a letter other that it's first letter. For example this page is better listed under C for Category than L for LXF. To do this, "pipe" the chosen letter like this:
[[Category:LXF Wiki|C]]
Subcategories
Sometimes a whole category of stuff comes under a broader category. Rather than add all those pages to both categories, add them all to the lower-level one, say Category:Help. Then, add Category:Help to the Category:LXF Wiki page.
Now, when you browse to Category:LXF Wiki, it lists Help as a subcategory. This saves cluttering up more than one list with all those Help pages.
In turn Category:LXF Wiki has been added to Category:Linux Format
You can run it the other way too and be as recursive as you like - it all makes stuff easier to find.
Displaying a link to a category page
If you just type the usual Wiki link, it adds the category to the category bar at the bottom of the page, instead of displaying the link inline. To display the link inline like this: Category:LXF Wiki, enter a colon : as the first character inside the brackets:
[[:Category:LXF Wiki]]
Finally, you may want to display something else for the link, for example in the last section I linked to Category:Help with the legend help. Just pipe it like any other link legend, like this:
[[:Category:Help|Help]]
Category gardening
Gardening is the general page maintenance activity on a Wiki. Categories benefit from routine gardening.
To find and fix pages that have not yet been categorised, I find it helpful to keep three views (tabs or windows) open on:
- Special:Categories - the list of categories.
- Special:Uncategorised pages - pages that need categorising.
- The page I am currently editing.
Some folk find it therapeutic to reorganise categories, for example by creating a new category such as Category:Desktop software, adding it as a sub-category to Category:Software, and then changing the category link on all the desktop software pages to link to the new category.
It all makes the rest of your stuff easier to find - which is why you wrote it in the first place, isn't it?
Categories: Consoles | Help | LXF Wiki
