This week, we’ll take a look at “Wanted categories" which you may be more familiar with as “red” categories. (As in "Help, my category is red!")
What exactly are these anyway? Red categories are categories listed on a page somewhere, but that do not exist as an actual category object...YET. If you’ve ever created a new category to add to a profile, then saved your work and looked at the profile again, the category link was red. This is because it is not linked into the category hierarchy. Red=unlinked=wanted.
So, how do you link your red category to the category hierarchy? Simple: you assign a parent category that is already a member of the hierarchy! Sometimes you can easily figure out the parent or parents (categories can have more than one, but should have only one within the same category stream.)
An example is a cemetery category. For most countries, when adding a cemetery, you add the parent categories of the municipality it’s located within, as well as a cemetery grouping category such as a county. So, I add a new cemetery [[Category:All Faiths Cemetery, Worcester, Massachusetts]] and the link to it is red in the profile after I save. Now what? Well, since I know that US cemeteries group into county cemetery categories, I look up “Worcester, Massachusetts” and find it’s in Worcester County. So, I click the red category and add [[Category:Worcester, Massachusetts]] for the municipality and [[Category:Worcester County, Massachusetts, Cemeteries]], add a little information like the address or a link to the Find a Grave cemetery page, and save the page. Now the category link will be green.
Other times, the parent category is not that obvious and you may need to do a little research in order to complete your red category’s set up. This is usually the case with many Military & War categories, such as military units. You may need to do some searching in order to find the proper parent category(ies). Use your Find>Search>Categories and type a search parameter into the box. Alternately, you could “drill down” by starting at the top level [[Category:Categories]], but you should already have an idea where you might need to look. It can take a lot of guessing when you use this method.
Sometimes you will find a red category after you enter parameters in a template. An example of this is adding a category to the One Name Study template.
{{One Name Study|name=Durbin|category=Italy, Durbin Name Study}}. If I added that to a profile and saved it, then looked at the profile, there would be a red category in the list of categories because [[Category:Italy, Durbin Name Study]] does not exist in the Durbin Name Study category hierarchy.
My next step, then, if I wanted to have that red category join the party would be to click on the red-linked category, which opens the category edit box. I’d type in [[Category:Durbin Name Study]], type in a little bit of text to explain the category usage, then save the page. Now the link to the category on the profile will be green and it is part of the category hierarchy.
The list of wanted or red categories is fairly long and categorization project members are tasked with adding them to the hierarchy as part of our category maintenance. You can take a peek at it Here. While you are looking at it, notice any trends in what's wanted? (Ding, ding, YES! Cemeteries, military units, places, and DNA make up the bulk of these categories with no parents.)
Users can prevent further additions to this list if a little extra care is taken when creating new categories. If you create a category and it’s red-linked and you do not know which parent categories to assign, just ask for help here in G2G and use the tag “categorization”.
Thank you for your time.
