Help:Categories
Categories are one of the ways that LifeWiki organizes the articles on the site so that readers can find information they need quickly. The category system, unlike many other wikis, is for the most part not hierarchical. That is, if a pattern is a glide symmetric spaceship, it should be placed in the glide symmetric category as well as the general spaceships category. This is to allow for browsing of patterns at as high or low of a level as desired by the user - they may browse all spaceships at once, all spaceships with a given speed, all glide symmetric spaceships, and so on.
How to add categories
To place an article in a category, you simply insert a link to the category somewhere on the page: [[Category:Spaceships]]. You can also specify an additional sortkey parameter that dictates where the page will appear, alphabetically, within the category. This is achieved by using the following markup: [[Category:Spaceships|My spaceship name]]. Note that if this is omitted, the page will alphabetize under the page's title.
If a page has multiple categories (and most do on LifeWiki), you can simplify the category sorting by declaring a {{DEFAULTSORT}} variable. Thus, you could have a line that says {{DEFAULTSORT:Something}}, which would cause the page to be automatically sorted under "Something" in any category used on that page. This can also be used with the {{PAGENAME}} variable, in the following syntax: {{DEFAULTSORT:{{PAGENAME}}}}, though this is in most cases redundant and not needed. Note that declaring a sortkey as described earlier will override a {{DEFAULTSORT}} declaration, in case you want to have the page sorted under a different letter in some categories.
There are also various categorization templates on the wiki to make this easier for certain types of frequently-added categories.
Linking to categories
If you instead want to link to a category rather than adding the current page to it, you can do this by adding a colon before the category name: [[:Category:Spaceships|List of spaceships]]. Some of the templates in the internal linking template list can be used to do this more easily.
Current category system
An alphabetical listing of the current categories is available at Special:Categories. Before creating a new category, check whether or not there is already an appropriate category. Note that most relevant categories are automatically added to pattern pages by that pattern's template. Also look over LifeWiki:Editor categories for a list of categories that are particularly useful for editors.
External links
- Help:Category at WikiMedia.org
- Help:Category at Wikipedia
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