Help:Categories

To help people find your page it is usually linked to by another page somewhere on the wiki (90% of pages are created this way, by adding a wiki link like My New Page Title and then clicking the red link to create the new page 'My New Page Title'.

Users can also use the search utility to find your page.

However, sometimes users want to browse through the wiki using the categories. For example, if I am looking for software configuration management tools I might go to the Tools category to see what's available and the click through to Configuration Management Tools and then Software Configuration Management Tools.

Another excellent reason for assigning your page to the correct categories is that this wiki uses the Semantic MediaWiki extension. This allows some fairly sophisticated queries to be constructed and Categories play a significant role in this query system. For example, the question 'show me all the tool suppliers who provide change management tools under a free or open source license' requires at two categories: 'Supplier' and 'Change Management Tool'.

To get your page listed in the correct categories you use a special case of the normal wiki link syntax. Category markers can appear anywhere in your page, but they are commonly put at the end of the page to make them easy to find.

To add your page to a category use:

Unlike normal wiki links these Category links are not rendered on the page but are instead presented in a special 'category' panel at the bottom of the page (this panel shows all the categories to which the page has been assigned).

If you want to create a link to the category you need to add a colon to the start of the link, like this.

Category:test

It is important to note that using the colon prefix creates a link to the category,but does not add the page to the category! This colon form is typically used within a page to link the user to the category page itself.

You can assign your page to as many categories as are appropriate, so if you think your page should be categorised as both a process and a best practice, you might use the following markup at the end of your page. (Note, these are examples and may not be real categories.)

Creating new categories
New categories are created as soon as someone enters them on their page. So, if I put the following on my page, the Process category will be created if it did not previously exist.

This raises an important point. If you mistype your category name, it will still be created in the mistyped form. The wiki does nothing to alert you to the fact that you've messed up.

The only indicator that you may have messed up is that the category will appear in the lower category panel as a red link indicating that the category page does not exist.

Category pages
Categories exist even if they have not 'category page'. However, if you create a new category you should create the category page too. These category pages perform two important roles:


 * 1) Category pages contain a description of what sort of page should be assigned to that category. This helps users correctly categorise their pages.
 * 2) A missing category page causes the category link in the lower category panel to appear red, this is a good indication to the user that they have assigned their page to an incorrect category (unless they intended to create a new category of course).

Category pages should be created as soon as you create a new category (just click the red category link and create the page as you would any other).

Sub-categories
Categories can be assigned into other categories, just like any normal wiki page. You use exactly the same markup as you would to assign a normal wiki page, but this time you use it on the categories own page (the one reached through the link in the category panel).

As with normal wiki pages you can assign your category to as many 'super' categories as you feel appropriate.