XSI-Wiki:XSIWiki categorization
This article provides guidelines on creating and organizing categories.
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What is a category?
A category is a list page which serves to classify topics; for example, the category Animation is meant to hold the individual topics, such as function curves and inverse kinematics. When you are reading an article and want to find the general category to explore, look at the bottom of that article for a "Categories:" box listing all the categories to which the topic of the page belongs.
All articles that get created should be grouped according to categories.
When do I use categories?
Every page in the article namespace should have at least one category. Categories should be on major topics that are likely to be useful to someone reading the article. You should always begin with the XSIWiki parent categories: Category:Modeling , Category:Animation , Category:Rendering , Category:Simulation , Category:Compositing , and Category:XSISDK . From these parent categories, you can expand out from there with subcategories as needed.
Questions to ask to know if a category is appropriate:
- Is it possible to write a few paragraphs or more on the subject of a category, explaining it?
- If you go to the article from the category, will it be obvious why it's there?
- Is the category subject prominently discussed in the article?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, then a new category is probably not needed.
Other considerations for categorization:
- An article can appear in more than one category, and each category can appear in more than one parent category. Restraint should be used, however — categories become less effective the more there are on a given article.
- An article should not be in both a category and its subcategory.
- An article with the same name as a category should usually belong only to that category.
- There are also special categories such as Category:XSIWiki which are intended to aid the function of managing and editing the Wiki.
For alternative methods of grouping articles, see portals . Also, much of this article was taken from (and modified for XSIWiki purposes) a Wikipedia discussion regarding "Categories, lists, and series boxes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories%2C_lists%2C_and_series_boxes).
Guidelines for assigning categories
Creating categories
Creating a category is as simple as adding a soft link to the appropriate article in the Category: namespace; for instance, to add Felis silvestris catus to the "fluffy creatures" category, you would edit the article and enter Category:Fluffy creatures at the bottom. A page called Category:Fluffy creatures will automatically list alphabetically all articles that contain the Category:Fluffy creatures link. The appeal of categories is that unlike lists, they update themselves automatically, and that one can use them to quickly find related articles.
You may see some inconsistencies when first creating the category: it may alternate between appearing empty and appearing with your first additions. It will probably correct itself in a few minutes.
Note that, although "uncreated" categories will correctly list articles that have been assigned to them, the category page itself does not exist until it is manually created. The easiest way to create the category page is to follow the edit link from an article and add a parent category and a category description as explained below.
Although the MediaWiki software does not prevent cycles (loops), these should usually be avoided.
Creating subcategories
Create subcategory pages by putting the name of the parent category on a category page that you would like to be the subcategory. Child categories (subcategories) are created by putting category:parent_category_name on the lower-level category pages. For example, on a (sub)category page called category:Character animation you put category:Animation, Character animation becomes a subcategory of Animation.
When adding an article to a category, or creating categories, be careful to use the correct categories and subcategories.
Horizontal categorization refers to placing an article in the correct category while vertical categorization refers to placing an article in the correct subcategory.
When assigning an article into categories, try to be thorough in a "horizontal" sense. You might need to poke around the category hierarchy a bit to find the right place. Try searching for articles similar to the article you are categorizing to get ideas or to find the most appropriate place.
In the "vertical" dimension, you should probably be more frugal. A good general rule is that articles should be placed in the most specific categories they reasonably fit in. But sometimes there's a good reason to assign an article to two categories, one of which is a direct or indirect subcategory of another.
