Manual:Category

What are categories?

Pages can be characterized with key words, so-called categories. This enables your user to find pages in your wiki more easily, and to display pages of the same category clustered on an automatically created category page.
Categories can be created manually (e.g. different topics in the wiki, or the names of departments within your organization). Furthermore, in special cases MediaWiki also assigns automatically created categories (e.g. for pages with broken page links).

Create and assign categories

There are two ways of creating a category, respectively of assigning a page to a category:

Classic

Open an article you want to assign to a category in edit mode. Now enter the following line of wiki-code (preferably at the end of the article):

[[Category:Name_of_the_desired_Category]]

Please note that

• any amount of categories may be created by all users. So before you start, it's best to make sure which categories already exist. This helps to avoid unnecessary duplications.
• there will be a category page created in the wiki for every category that hasn't been assigned before. This category page should also be filled with content (see below).
• a page can be assign to multiple categories.
• the exact line in the source, where the category is assigned, is technically completely irrelevant. However, it is usual to insert categories at the end of an article.
• the syntax of a category doesn't allow any blanks in the name. These will be marked with an underline (e.g. [[Category:New_pages]]).

After saving the article, the assigned categories will be displayed in the page header.

Using InsertCategory

You can also use the BlueSpice function InsertCategory to assign or create categories.
To do so, click on the button while in edit more, or choose Insert category from the context menu you can open in the upper right corner of the page.

More informationen about InsertCategory can be found here.

Display of all existing category pages

On the special page Special:Categories you can display a list of all existing categories in your wiki. Click on the category to get to the respective category page. If a page in the listing is still marked red, the category has been linked, but the associated category page has not been edited yet.

Display of all pages of a category

On the page Category:Name_of_the_desired_Category you will find all pages and files assigned to a particular category.

If you have opened a red link - a category page that has not yet been edited - you have the possibility to enter a short (or longer) description of the category, so that authors and readers in your wiki know how to use this category.

Please note: when working with mutated vowels in your wiki ("Umlaute"), articles using them will be placed at the end of each sorting of a category page (e.g. "Mädchen" after "Muh"). With the help of the variable {{DEFAULTSORT:sortkey}} you can assign an alternative title that will be used for the sorting (e.g. {{DEFAULTSORT:Maedchen}}).

You can learn more about Variables in the article about MagicWords.

Special: Multilevel category system

You can also create a multilevel category system. To do so, you just have to assign new categories to existing category pages, making them sub-categories of the assigned category. You can use any way already explained above.

The so-called category tree is a practical way to display all categories and sub-categories of your wiki. You can learn more about it here.

Linking to category pages

Linking to a category requires a colon in front of the namespace.
Example: [[:Category:New_pages]]
If this colon is missing, the category page will not be linked, but the article itself will be assigned to the respective category!

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