Iron Chariots Wiki:Categorization

Revision as of 12:57, 11 September 2006

This page is intended to be a central place to discuss matters of categorization (discuss issues on the talk page then transfer guidelines to this page when a consensus has been reached).

The current category structure can be browsed beginning at Category:Browse categories. An alphabetical list of categories is available at Special:Categories.

See also:

• Special:Allpages — choose the "Category" namespace and you can get an alphabetical listing of categories starting at a specified place (example)
• Special:Prefixindex — similar interface, but this returns only those categories whose names start with (i.e., actually contain, at the beginning) the specified string (example)

Basic philosophy

The [[Category:]] mechanism of the MediaWiki software provides for a "bottom-up" approach to page classification. This is in contrast to the "top-down" approach provided by the construction of "index" or "topic" pages (pages whose main purpose is to link to other articles). Both approaches are useful and can coexist on a wiki.

Naming of categories

We need to decide on category naming conventions.

One convention that has already seen wide use:

• Use "sentence style" capitalization, as opposed to "title" style. That is, one should capitalize the first word of a category (technically this is optional since the first character is case insensitive) and thereafter only words that would normally be capitalized in running text (i.e., a regular sentence).
  • Correct: Category:Arguments for the existence of God (Note: God is a proper noun)
  • Incorrect: Category:Arguments for the Existence of God, Category:Arguments For The Existence Of God, etc.

Other issues

See Wikipedia's "Categorization" page for an idea of some of the issues that might arise and their possible solutions.