Placeement and ordering of categories

Question

When adding a category to a profile is there an order of importance that should be used?  should military be placed before sports or migration?

As I am seeing lately some members in a rush to get their 1000 badges are just adding categories to profiles as fast as they can and moving on to the next profile without any thought as to what is already added to the profile by the manager or trusted list members.

Comments

I don't believe we have any standardized guidelines regarding the ordering/order of importance of categories on a profile. You are free to sort them as you wish, but understand that other WikiTreers may change your order.

For profiles that you solely manage, you should feel free to revert any changes to your preference. But for profiles you jointly manage, you should consult with co-managers before reverting changes. Also, for profiles others manage, you should consult the managers first.

For unmanaged profiles, you can sort the categories as you wish, but again, others may change your order to their preferences.

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Does the order you place them on the profile change anything? It shouldn't make any difference when you're looking at the profile view.

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It changes the order in which the categories appear in the displayed list. They appear there in the same order as they do at the top of the biography text. Chronological ordering from birth to death, as suggested by David below, is a way of making the display appear more logical.

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Gotcha. I think, then, that Natalie's answer is the correct one. There is no order that matters. Anyone can order them in whichever way they like, but everyone will certainly have a different preference. It makes no difference to the core functionality of categories.

I for one would hate to have to establish a policy or police it. We'd be back to the bad-old-days of people asking why we're disrespecting military service (eg) if we wanted to go with chronological or alphabetical.

Answer 1

I generally try to do them chronologically (born, youth places, career, notability stuff, death, burial, etc) but I can't honestly see how it matters if they're in the 'wrong' order.

Duplication of categories, sure that's a problem of moving too fast.

Comments

Hi Kevin and David

I too try for chronological order, though generally I aim for place-based categories clumped together (born e.g, [[Category: Wangaratta, Victoria]], lived as a young person e.g. [[Sale, Victoria]],.moved to, retired in, in died).

I always put maintenance ("Needs") categories last.

Like David, I agree it shouldn't matter terribly much if categories are in a different order to this.

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I tend to clump location categories chronologically, but sometimes I place them before, after or between other types of categories. Any categories added by a template will be added in the order the template appears in the text, although you can add the category manually to move it up.

Answer 2

Ok this may seem like a daft question… but how do you order them… I just add using the box and it inserts it…

Do you them shift them around? And that would change the display order?

Comments

Thanks! There could be plenty of people like who don’t realise, either that or I’m just daft on my own

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Someday I'll read the entire thread before posting a comment. So, from my just-posted comment:

Any categories added by a template will be added in the order the template appears in the text, although you can add the category manually to move it up.

The order of elements is Categories, Research Notes Boxes, Project Boxes (from [Help: Biographies#Proper order]).

Stickers go below the == Biography == heading (also from [Help: Biographies#Proper order], as well as [Help: Stickers#Location on profiles]). I tend to order them chronologically, but if there is a Notables Sticker, I'll usually have it first.

Answer 3

Categories do not need to be in any specific order. And category sorting occurs within the category structure (subcategories within a specific category), not on profiles.

Answer 4

I've been doing a lot of categorisation lately, mostly filling up all the old UK television programme categories that I found woefully underpopulated, with (mostly) British actors of the era.

If I find an actor who was in a show, I look to see what other shows they were in and add them, and they default to the top of the page.  In most cases I just leave it at that and move on, though I might take a bit more care if it is a carefully curated profile with lots of categories and details.  Like an architect designing an extension to an old building, you try to follow the same style.  At the other extreme if there is no information at all I might add a little one-line summary and a Wikitree/IMDB link.

I don't think too many Wikitreers overly concern themselves with categories, they are kind of an afterthought and I guess it's up to the profile manager, if there is one, to arrange the order.  It's more of a presentation issue, like putting backgrounds and photos on a profile.  Many profiles don't have any categories at all (and I'm as guilty as anyone when I'm building a chain of profiles to connect someone to the Big Tree).

Answer 5

There is a problem of templates generating categories which can result in categories getting out of whatever sequence a Profile manager may want to do.

For instance if a Notables sticker is used it ends up being categorized with Notables and whatever other parameter is used after the manually added categories. The same for most military related stickers just to give a few big examples.

So any guidelines that may be agreed on if the community wants to consider them would have to take into account some templates and stickers generate categories that won't always line up with what a person desires their categories to be ordered in.