Help:Categories

Categories provide automatic indexes that are useful as tables of contents.

You can categorize pages and files by adding one or more category tags to the content text. These tags create links at the bottom of the page that take you to the list of all pages in that category, which makes it easy to browse related articles.

Summary

Each of the pages in the Category namespace represents a so-called category, a grouping of related pages, and contains an index for the pages of its category. For example, this page belongs to . If you open the category page, you will see a link to this page there.

When a page belongs to one or more categories, these categories appear at the bottom of the page (or in the upper-right corner, depending on the skin being used).

The category pages themselves contain 2 parts:

• at their beginning, an optional part may contain text that can be edited, like any other page,
• at their end, an ever present, automatically generated, alphabetical list of all pages in that category, in the form of links. In fact, in the Unicode sort order.

To assign a category to a page, simply add the link "[[Category:Category name]]" to the page's wikitext. The usual place to add it is at the bottom of the page.

To link a category page within a page as a normal wiki link (without adding the page to the category), prefix the link name with a colon. For example: [[:Category:Not in this category]]

New categories can be created before assigning any page to it, in the same way as any other regular page.

For a complete list of all categories which have at least one page, see Special:Categories.

For a complete list of all created/edited categories, including the ones that don't have any pages, see Special:Allpages/Category: (note the colon at the end).

Adding a page to a category

To add a page or uploaded file to a category, simply edit the page and add the following text (where Name is the name of the category you want to add it to).

[[Category:Name]]

Any number of Category tags may be added to the page and the page will be listed in all of them.

On a categorized page, categories are displayed in the Categories: box strictly in the order they appear in the wikitext.

Creating a category page

Categories exist even if their page has not been created, but these categories are isolated from others and serve little purpose for organization or navigation.

A category is created by creating a page in the Category: namespace. A category page can be created the same way as other wiki pages (see Help:Starting a new page); just add "Category:" before the page title.

To avoid extra work, try searching within your wiki before creating a new category. The list of all categories can be found in "Special pages" in the "tools" box of the sidebar.

Linking to a category

To create a link to a category, use a leading colon before the category name (without this colon, the current page would be added to the category):

[[:Category:Help]] → Category:Help

To change the link text, write the text inside the link tag after a pipe:

[[:Category:Help|Help category]] → Help category

Redirect pages that redirect to categories must also use the colon, otherwise they will be added to the category instead of redirecting.