Help:Making Navigation Easier
From TCWiki
Purpose: After reading this article, you should have all or most of the information necessary to add pages that coherently fit into the rest of the wiki, and to reorganize the messier parts of the wiki.
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Categories
Nearly every page should have a category. You can find pages without categories in the special page: Uncategorized pages. You can find the list of categories that exist in the special page: Categories, but all categories should be reachable by walking down the category tree following links from the Main Page.
To apply a category tag to a page, type
[[Category:CategoryNameGoesHere]]
at the end of the article. Place one category tag for each category the page belongs in, including subcategories. For instance, if your l337saber is both a weapon and an item (because all weapons are items), you need to have:
[[Category:Weapons]] [[Category:Items]]
at the bottom of its page.
To create a new category, drop its category tag at the bottom of your page. Think carefully about whether you want a new category or to use an existing one, as this is a more serious operation. Are there going to be several pages for this item? Will they concern things that more than one author created?
If so, click the category link, and on the page that pops up, create a short description of what the category represents. DO NOT include explicit links to all the items in the category. Mediawiki's software handles that part automatically.
If the new category is part of another category (for instance, you create an armor category, which should be part of weapons) include the parent category as a category tag in the category's description. Example:
[[Category:Items]]
This will automatically make the subcategory part of its parent category. You can have whole trees of categories. Be sure that all the items in the subcategories include all parent categories up to but not including the main page, so that they can be accessed in the larger list views.
If your category doesn't have a parent category, be sure to add it to the main page.
A discussion of the next, previous, uplevel templates likely belong here
But I don't understand them at all.--BozoCat 15:59, 8 Feb 2007 (PST)
Linking to a category
Linking to a category is a little tricky. Linking to the name of the category will link to some other page. In other words, [[:Category:Largoists]] does not link to the same place as [[Largoists]].
Including a category tag will make a link to the category, but it'll also make the page you're linking from part of the category, which you don't want, for instance, in the case of the main page. So here's how you do it.
Include a colon in front of the category tag, to tell MediaWiki not to do any interpretation on the tag. Then, you may not want the word "category" to appear in your link, so use the | operator to change the text of the tag.
Thus:
[[:Category:Largoists|People who worship Largo]] comes out as People who worship Largo.
Renaming
Moving a page you gave the wrong name to is a piece of cake. Click the move tap, and type in the name of the new page. If that name is taken (say you had a redirect that you now want to be the real page), simply edit both, and cut the text from one to the other. If you use the move tab, you won't have to update links because MediaWiki automatically creates a redirect page (see below) for it.
If you moved a page by copying text, you can find all the places that link to the old page using the "what links here" link in the toolbox from the old page. Go to each place and update the links by hand, or change the old place into a redirect to your new location. See below for redirects.
A discussion of disambiguation pages woudl go here
Except we don't have any. We'll need one for Church of Miho faction versus place eventually, at which point I'll try to learn how it works.--BozoCat 15:59, 8 Feb 2007 (PST)
Redirecting
Redirection is teh awesome. If page A has a redirect to page B, all links to page A go directly to page B, and mention that they were directed, so that you can go back and edit A if you need to. If you have a character with 3 different names, or a faction with lots of ways to call it (or abbreviations) this is amazingly handy to reduce the number of broken links.
To make a redirecting page, first make a link to the name you want redirecting to your target. So for instance, for Ash the Instigator, I made a link on my personal page to Ash. Next I clicked it, which brought up a fresh page. Finally, I typed in the following:
#REDIRECT [[Ash the Instigator]]
That's it. now all links to Ash go right to Ash the Instigator. People no longer need to remember exactly which variant of my character's name I use most often, and can just link to whatever comes to mind. I encourage doing this anyplace that won't increase confusion (i.e. if there were two characters with the same first name, having a link from the first name would be ambiguous).
Redirect pages don't appear in category views either, so no worries about clutter.
There's a couple special pages in the toolbox that help clean up problems with redirects. I highly recommend them. In particular, Wanted Pages is a great way to find places where people tried to link to something of yours but got it wrong. Click wanted pages and turn them into redirects to quickly fix lots of broken links.
