Help:uniKB for Managers

Topics

Categories

The concept of "tagging" and how categories work in Mediawiki

• Think of categories as tags or labels that you would apply to something. For example, alprazolam is a "controlled narcotic". It is also a "generic drug". The terms "generic drugs" and "controlled narcotics" are not mutually exclusive, nor is one strictly inclusive of the other i.e. not all generic drugs are controlled narcotics and not all narcotics are generic drugs. Avoid getting caught up in the mutual exclusivity of your categories, and rather think in a nebulous mindset when drumming up categories.

• Categories can be as broad-sounding as you want, or they can be as descriptive as you want. In the end, they're just tags to an article. An article on benzocaine could be categorized as "Topical Anaesthetic Drugs", or just "Drugs", or "Drugs affecting the central nervous system". Or it could be categorized as all 3. Deciding on the descriptive depth of your categories is an evolving process, but generally it is better to start broader, as in Mediawiki there exists some concept of subcategorization (more on this later).

• Creating a category generates a category page that dynamically displays all the pages that have been tagged to that category. This effectively groups your articles according to a certain topic, or "tag".

• Further to the previous point, the value of categories (and their category pages) is therefore to present some navigability to your department's articles, whether as visual cues (links users can click to drill down on a certain topic), or providing confines for a search (searching within a particular category). To the back-end, your department's articles exist as one giant pool of pages i.e. there is no functional (technical) value to using categories - they're simply used as a means to get to a page.

• The most confusing aspect of understanding Mediawiki categories is the fact that categories exist "at the same level". As stated previously, categories to an article are just tags or labels. Below is the footer of an article displaying the categories to which it has been tagged. Notice the absence of hierarchy. No one tag is a subset of another.

• On the other hand, the most interesting aspect of understanding

Guidelines for using categories

While the previous section explains the concept of Mediawiki categories and how they work, perhaps the only way to truly understand categories is by starting to use them. This section is written with the intent that if you follow these general guidelines when categorizing your articles, you will begin to see and appreciate how categories work.

• You will have few categories (or perhaps none) in the beginning, so develop broad categories where your think content (articles) can begin to fit under. Create them as links on your department page to get you going, using the following syntax as an example:

[[:Category:Accounts Payable]]

• This creates a link to the category page for Accounts Payable. It will appear in red as the page has not yet been created.