Help:uniKB for Managers

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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 mutual exclusivity of your categories.

• Categories can be as broad-sounding as you want, or they can be as descriptive as you want. In the end, they're still 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". The page could also be categorized as all 3. Deciding on the perfect 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).

• The value of categories is to present some navigability to your department's articles, whether through visual cues provided by category links or providing confines for a search (searching within a particular category). In 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.

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 you 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.