Forum:Categories

Lots of enthusiasm evident in this wiki. Even someone who writes about a particular truck under two different page names.

Helping readers and contributors to find their way to a subject even if they don't know exactly what it is called - that's one of the purposes of categories, introduced to Wikipedia in about June 2004 and firmly established as part of every standard-issue Wikia site. Another purpose is to list similar pages automatically without requiring manual construction and updating of lists of "See also".

See Special:Categories for a list of what's on the wiki, which includes those in Special:WantedCategories, those that contain something even if they haven't been created yet! Most wikis used to show the wanted ones in red on the list of all categories, but Wikia management decided to remove that distinction; now if you want to see a list of only the existing categories you can go to Special:AllPages and work your way down to http://foodtruck.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3AAllPages&from=&to=&namespace=14.

Also Special:UncategorizedCategories for the orphans, and if the wiki is really organized there will be only one category there; currently I see thirty, a much-too-large proportion of the categories.

Most of what is written on this wiki should be in at least one category that's a subcategory of Category:Content or a subcategory of one of those. Frequently two or more categories for one page, such as location, types of meal, and brand name.

Category pages can be edited (and in order to get parent categories they have to be), and a brief introduction is often desirable, but if a category turns into an article the automatically-generated lists of contents will be pushed out of sight, which is a pity. Put the textual stuff in an article of the same name if it's getting to be more than a few lines. Many wikis use a handy template Cat main to put at the top of the category page with a link to the article.

Enjoy!

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:56, August 12, 2011 (UTC)