Help:Category
- See also Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki for this page.
Quick help:
- To add an entry to a category, place
[[Category:Category name]]on the page. - To see all the entries in a category, follow (that is, click on) the hyperlink with the category name located at the bottom of the page.
The categorization facility provided by the MediaWiki software is a powerful tool for automating the creation of lists. Whenever you think of creating a list of words, consider creating a category instead. Unlike lists, categories are updated automatically. There is no need, as there is with lists, to maintain links in two places - the list and the individual entries within it. Categories are very useful for finding similar words or subjects and for finding "gaps".
How-to[edit]
How to add pages to categories[edit]
To add a page to a category, simply add a wikilink to the full category title. For example, to add the entry for apple to Category:English nouns, simply edit the English section of the entry and add [[Category:English nouns]] at the bottom.
The category link will not appear in the text of the entry. Instead, a link to the category will appear in a box at the bottom of the entry, and the category page Category:English nouns will contain a link to the apple entry.
In entries with multiple language sections, place category links inside the appropriate section. A category relating to English goes in the English section, one relating to Chinese goes in the Chinese section, and so on. (Wiktionary does not put all of the category links at the bottom of the page as Wikipedia does.)
In many cases, categories are added automatically by templates. For example, the {{en-noun}} template adds the entry apple to Category:English nouns.
How to link to categories[edit]
To display a category link, put a colon before the full page name in the wikilink. For example, to create the link Category:Languages, enter [[:Category:Languages]]. Using [[Category:Languages]] with no colon at the beginning does not display a link; it simply puts the page in the category.
Category pages[edit]
Each category can have a category page. Categories without category pages will list all of the entries in the category, however they will not be linked into the category tree properly until they have a category page, that is itself categorized into the parent category. (For example: Category:English nouns is categorized into Category:English language.)
Be aware that because of caching and delayed updates, additions to categories may not appear immediately, and when creating category pages the red hyperlinks at the bottom of categorized entries may not immediately turn blue. The changes usually take a few minutes to appear.
Category names do start with first letter capitalized, while the main namespace and template namespaces are the ones that have 1st character case sensitivity.
Category boilerplate templates (catboilers)[edit]
There are templates that create category pages automatically. These are called category boilerplate templates, or catboilers for short. For a list, see Category:Category boilerplate templates.
Use {{auto cat}} on the most common categories. It looks at the page title and figures out which template to use. That way, you do not have to spend time learning the template names and the parameters that the templates use.
For example, in the category page Category:English nouns, {{auto cat}} takes the page title and (invisibly) chooses the template {{poscatboiler|en|nouns}} to create the content on the page.
Oriented graph[edit]
The MediaWiki software does not require that categories form a strict hierarchy. In general, it allows them to form a directed graph. However, with the exception of the maintenance categories, on Wiktionary the intent is for the categories to form an oriented graph with a single root at Category:Fundamental.
