Help talk:Categories

MediaWiki Extensions
Some MediaWiki Extensions we may consider using or at least get some organizational ideas from:

Installed 19 Oct 2012

 * Multi-Category Search -- stable, add or subtract categories from Search
 * Try it: Special:MultiCategorySearch
 * Documentation at Mediawiki.org


 * Dynamic Page List -- stable, last updated Aug 2012, handles,  and .
 * See it: Find:Teaching materials on Teflpedia
 * Documentation at Mediawiki.org


 * Category Tree -- stable, continuous updates --Looks good on http://wikiversity.org
 * Try it: on Special:Categories ...after I get it configured
 * Documentation at Mediawiki.org

To research

 * Dynamic Page List (third-party) -- more resource intensive
 * CrossCat -- experimental, last updated Sep 2011

Redirect Category -- don't
Putting #Redirect is not useful. Don't!

What happens if you do is bad--pages with (they do not get listed in  to see what's in it gets auto-redirected to [[Category:1]] and thus never finds those pages.

Sub-categories
The display of Sub-categories above the list of Pages in a Category is visually confusing because the Sub-category links look just like Page links. See Category:activities which has many Sub-categories.

Maybe I could differentiate this visually via MediaWiki:Common.css, but not today and not necessarily successfully.

Singular category names?
A singular category name convention (eg category:author, not category:authors) can be achieved by editing non-conforming category names and all the corresponding category tags. Is it necessary? I don't know. Is this beneficial? I don't know. Perhaps by trying it we find out. So yesterday I did it--I spent all day yesterday doing it by hand. This sort of repetitive scriptable edit should be done with a bot. Next time. (I need to learn how to use a bot!) If we decide in retrospect that perhaps plural category names are more intuitive and likely and equally functional, I might just use a bot to adjust all category names into plural form another day. I feel exhausted and stupid having done all those edits by hand yesterday. At least by doing it that way I got a peak at lots of pages and put some additional category tags on pages that needed them. A little mess and effort can be expected in development. I will try to keep disruption to a minimum. --Roger 12:51, 19 October 2012 (CDT)
 * I think that some categories are probably better if they are plural. I've just had a look at WP and they have a mixture of plural and singular. But at the end of the day it' probably not a major issue as long as we don't have both a singular and a plural category for the same thing.--Bob M 02:00, 20 October 2012 (CDT)
 * Right. I am using Category-bot to put Category names back into plural form now (...s and ...ies). I think plural Category names, at least for countable nouns, may as well be our norm, like on other wikis. Uncountable nouns in category names may present possible exceptions, but we can decide about those on a case by case basis when an as appropriate. Thanks for your patience with my somewhat disruptive exploration of this! --Roger 17:22, 21 October 2012 (CDT)