Help:Categories

What are Categories?

Categories provide automatic indexes for articles. Similar to a table of contents, they allow you to organize the sites content into similar content groupings. Each article is typically in at least one category. It is common for articles to be in multiple categories as the content of the article may be relevant to many categories.

For a complete list of categories, see Special:Categories.

How are Categories Created?

Each of the pages in the Category namespace represents a so-called category, a kind of grouping of related pages.For example, this page belongs to "Category:Help". When a page belongs to one or more categories, this information appears at the bottom of the page (or in the upper-right corner, depending on the skin being used).

The page of the category contains text that can be edited, like any other page, but when displaying the page, the last part of what is displayed is an automatically generated, alphabetical list of all pages in that category, in the form of links.

New categories can be created and edited in the same way as any other regular page, but when displayed, an automatically generated, alphabetical list of all pages in that category appears at the bottom. You can assign a category to an article simply by adding [[Category:categoryname]] to the article's source. Substitute the actual name of the category in place of categoryname.

Subcategories

Categories themselves can also be specified to belong to another category. When displaying the page of a category to which other categories belong, a separate automatically generated, alphabetical list of subcategories is also produced. For example you could edit Category:BikramYoga and add the link Category:Yoga. The Bikram Yoga category would then be a subcategory of the Yoga category.