Help:Category

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, but rather intends to describe some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut H:CAT

Categories are intended to group together pages on similar subjects. They are implemented by a MediaWiki feature that adds any page with a text like [[Category:XYZ]] in its wiki markup to the automated listing that is the category with name XYZ. Categories help readers to find, and navigate around, a subject area, to see pages sorted by title, and to thus find article relationships.

Categories are normally found at the bottom of an article page. Clicking a category name brings up a category page listing the articles (or other pages) that have been added to that particular category. There may also be a section listing the subcategories of that category. The subcategorization feature makes it possible to organize categories into tree-like structures to aid navigation.

The term category does refer to both the title of a category page—the category pagename—and the category itself. Keeping this in mind while reading about categorization, plus learning a category page layout is a worthwhile investment in research techniques. (See also the search box parameter "incategory".) The layout of a category page is mostly text, but see about displaying category trees below.