Category School Series

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Welcome to Category School

Lesson One: Personal Categories

I'm beginning a series of posts to inform on the use of our category hierarchy. Today's topic is Personal Categories, which are a great tool to use in your WikiTree activities.

Let's say you are researching profiles for a project or just for your own family research and you want to have a way to keep this organized. You can use personal categories to do it. Just decide what will work for your purposes, then create some categories.

Your top level personal category is [[Category:YourWikiID]](See: more information about WikiTree ID) , so mine is [[Category:Durbin-702]]. Go to your own profile page and add the category if you didn't already create one. The category will be red, but click that red link and enter the parent category into the category edit box.The parent category you should add is [[Category:Personal Categories]]. Then scroll down and save it. Now you have your personal category. Next you need to add subcategories, where you will add profiles and/or other subcategories.

The subcategories MUST start with your WikiTree ID in order to be your personal subcategories. One of mine is [[Category:Durbin-702 Needs Biography]]. If I just used [[Category:Needs Biography]] and gave it a parent of [[Category:Durbin-702]] then it would be for WikiTree-wide use, which is not what I want. I want to have a place for profiles I manage or otherwise care about, so that I know that "these profiles need a biography written."

I can use any names I like for sub-category names, but, as noted in Help:Category Names, "The only allowed characters are Letters in any alphabet, numbers, space, comma, dot, hyphen (only the normal one but not wide, ...), single quotation mark (as apostrophe but do not use apostrophe) and parentheses (in pair). There is also a colon in the name but must be used only following "Category:""

The subcategories should have a parent of [[Category:YourWikiID]]. The only profile that should have a parent category of [[Category:YourWikiID]] is your own! And only WikiTree members can have personal categories; other profiles may not.

If you find that you no longer need some of the personal subcategories, feel free to delete them. If you don't know how to do that, we can help with that:here.

Here is a screenshot of my personal category page:

Durbin-702 Personal Category page

More information is here: Help:Personal_Categories

(See post and all comments:here.)

Lesson Two: Wanted Categories

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”.

(See post and all comments: here.)

Lesson Three: The Category Page

Hi again, today I'm going to cover what you find on the page for every category in our Category namespace.

Here is Category:Health. If you have trouble seeing it, you can open this photo in another tab. It's here.

Screenshot of Category:Health

I chose Category:Health because you can see all of the information that’s available to you in one screen shot. Let’s start at the upper left. First you see the name of the category page, which is Category:Health. One thing I want to point out is that there really should be no space between the colon after “Category” and before “Health”. If you name it with a space there, it will still work though. Directly beneath this we see Category:Categories. This is the only parent category of Category:Health. Sometimes there will be more parent categories to a particular category. By the way, Category:Categories is the top of the category tree and has no parent category. It is the only category that has no parent category.

Beneath this, you see a long yellow box. This has been applied by the use of the AKA template, which links to parallel categories in an array of languages. In the photo, you see that can be viewed in England and in French. So, if you clicked the "fr", you would see that category populated with French language subcategories.

Beneath that, there are the Subcategories, and Category:Health has 7 subcategories. They are sorted in alphabetical order and the links to the subcategories are displayed. Category:Health is a “container” category and it is a high level (also called top level) category that does not contain profiles. If there were profiles attached, they would be displayed beneath the subcategories under the heading “People or pages in Health.”

At the bottom of the page, in the center, you see the date of the last modification to the page and how many times it has been accessed.

Now for the links. In the upper right, there are 5 links, each with its own purpose. The first is “Limit to Watchlist.” If you wanted to check to see if any profile in your watchlist was attached to this category, you could click the link and see the result. Next is “How to Categorize,” which is a link to Help:Categorization, so that is one click away as long as you’re looking at a category page. The next link is “Category Search,” which opens the category search page. The search box will be in the upper left after you click and will use the google custom search to look for whatever category you wish. This will not search any other WikiTree page types. Now we come to the “WikiTree+ search.” This is a handy way to search WikiTree and will be the subject of its own Category School class in the future. For now, just know that you can search for categories there by using two variables and you can also search for content in a category page. So, if you wanted to find 100 profiles containing the words “Ohio orphan’’ you could search that and the results will display. The final link at the top is “WikiTree+Navigate.” When you click that from a category page, it will open to display the structure to two levels (it the category has that many.) Click here to see the WIkiTree+ Navigate page for Category:Health.

Under those links you see the link to [edit] the category page. If you click that, you will open the edit box of the category, where you add text, links, etc. We will cover that page on another Category School as well.

Moving to the bottom right of the page, you see three final links. The first is another [edit] link, which is the same as the one we just talked about. Next is the [what links here] llink, which will show you any pages that link to the category (person profiles and free-space profiles). Finally, there is a [change history] link. When you click this, you can see the entire edit history of the category from its inception to its latest edit. Each edit is on one line and contains the time and date of the edit, the WikiID of the user who edited, and some comments. If there is more than one edit showing, you can click the radio buttons and compare the versions to see what was changed.

That covers the Category Page.

(See post and all comments: here.)