Help:Categories

Categories are a convenient way to organize pages and files into groups. They can be used to group similar or related pages and files into sets, simplifying searching and maintenance. For example, lists of species within genera are maintained using categories (see ). Ideally every page and file will belong to at least a few categories and some pages will belong to many.

Categories are a powerful way to organise information and are especially useful as the size and complexity of Antwiki increases.

Introduction to Categories
You can categorize a page or file 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.

Assigning content to a category means each item in that category is listed on automatically created "category" pages.

A page or file can include more than one category.

Summary
Each of the pages in the Category namespace (i.e., http://ants.csiro.au/Category:categoryname) contains an index for the pages of its category. For example, this page belongs to "Category:Help". If you open the "Category:Help" page, you will see a link to this page there.

When a page belongs to one or more categories, these categories appears at the bottom of the page.

Each category page contains 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 ASCII 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

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

For a complete list of all categories, including the ones that don't have any page, 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).



Any number of     tags may be added to the page and the page will be listed in all of them. tags are usually added at the very bottom of the page for the convenience of other editors.

Images
explain image categories here........

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''' the following are old notes from the Help:Images page. The "image categorization" section now links to here so this needs to be (better!) explained on this page...........

Add whatever categories seem sensible. Categorizing your image can be a bit of extra work but it does help others to find all the great photos you contribute to Antwiki. Every category listed on an image page creates, or adds to, a gallery-of-images page for that category. For example adding an to an image would add the image to this gallery: Category:montage. This can be a bit tricky for some genera since the images come after all the other text on the page. If you go to Category:Aphaenogaster, for example, you would have to go to the second page in this category since there are over 200 names (the limit for a category page is to list no more than 200 items).

We strongly suggest that any image of an ant include a category for the genus and for the full species name or, if not identified to species, a genus category. For example, the following image is placed in these three categories:



You can look at each of these category pages to see how these get sorted out with similarly categorized pages and files.
 * Category:Aphaenogaster
 * Category:Aphaenogaster kimberleyensis
 * Category:montage

If you want to keep track of all the images you upload, you could also add a category for yourself

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 " " 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 "" in the "" box of the sidebar.

Unlike other wiki pages, it is not possible to rename (move) a category. It is necessary to create a new category and change the     tag on every page. The new category will not have the older category's page history, which is undesirable if there are many revisions.

Managing the category hierarchy
Categories may belong to other categories in a hierarchy. Since category pages are much like any other page, a     tag may be added to the bottom of a category page.

It is a good idea to organize all categories into a hierarchy with a single top level category. The category structure can take the form of a tree with separate branches, but more often will have a graph structure. Generally, there should be a contiguous chain of parent-child links between each category and the top level category.

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):


 * &rarr;    :Help

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


 * &rarr; Help category

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

Portions of this page are modified from (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Categories), a page from the Mediawiki Manual.