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Using categories in the Via Nova Architectura wiki
Categories help users find information, even if they don't know that it exists or what it's called.
Every page in the Via Nova Architectura wiki should belong to at least one category. The categories to be included, which serve as classifications, should be the significant (useful) topics to which the subject of the article most closely belongs to as a member, and where users are most likely to look if they can't remember the name of the thing they are trying to look up. For example:
- Article: Mid office
- Useful category: Category:Enterprise architecture patterns
Each article can appear in more than one category, and each category can appear in more than one parent category. Multiple categorization schemes co-exist simultaneously. In other words, categories do not form a strict hierarchy or tree structure.
How to categorize an article
Categorizing an article is simply performed by editing it to include one or more category declarations. For instance, to add Mid Office article to the "Patterns" category, you would edit the article and enter [[Category:Patterns]] at the bottom.
When adding an article to a category, or creating categories, one should be careful to use the correct categories and subcategories. Horizontal categorization, directly below, refers to placing an article in the correct category while vertical categorization refers to placing an article in the correct subcategory.
When creating categories . . .
Category naming
Categories follow the same general naming conventions as articles, for example do not capitalize regular nouns.
Look before you leap
Before creating a category, look to see if one already exists. The best way to do this is to first add the category to your article but preview before saving. When previewing a page, scroll right to the very bottom of the browser window to see the categories. If the category appears in blue, the category already exists. If it is in red, then you will be creating a new category. Check the capitalization of the category name. For any red categories, you should look for categories with similar names before creating a new category. One way to do this is to think of the parent category for the new category. Search for it and then look at the subcategories in the parent. You may find that a category already exists that is similar to the one you are thinking about creating.
How to create subcategories
Subcategories may be created by putting [[Category:parent_category_name]] onto the page that you would like to make into a subcategory. This may seem counterintuitive, because you edit the subcategory page rather than the parent category page.
Let's say that you wanted to make the category called Roses into a subcategory of the category called Flowers.
- Step 1 - Go to the page called [[Category:Roses]], and click edit this page.
- Step 2 - Place the text [[Category:Flowers]] within the body of the [[Category:Roses]] article, and save.
- Finished! Roses is now a subcategory of Flowers, and [[Category:Roses]] will be visible on [[Category:Flowers]].
When writing the description for a category try to give it at least two parent categories. For example, Category:British writers should be in both Category:Writers by nationality and Category:British people. A few categories do only merely subdivide their parent category, but unless the parent category has many potential articles under it, or many potential subdivisions, if you can't think of a second parent category, it might be a better idea to fold your smaller category into the parent.
Links to categories
You can create a link to a category page without adding the page to that category by using a colon before the word Category. Example: [[:Category:Automotive technologies]] appears as Category:Automotive technologies.
