Help:Categories

2008-06-15T17:14:58Z

Kingboyk: /* See also */ meta is not installed as an interwiki link by default in Mediawiki, and we should be building good quality help here not linking there

{{PD Help Page}}

MediaWiki allows you to categorize pages by adding one or more category tags to the text. Adding these tags create links at the bottom of the article which take you to the list of all pages in that category, which makes it easy to browse related articles.

== How to add categories ==

To add an article to a category put the following at the end of the page you are editing...

<nowiki>[[Category:NAME]]</nowiki>

where NAME is the name of the category you want to add it to. Any number of category tags may be added to the page - the page will be listed in all of them.

You can also specify an additional SORT parameter that dictates where the page will appear, alphabetically, within the category. This is achieved by using the following markup:

<nowiki>[[Category:NAME|SORT]]</nowiki>

So for example, to add this page to the 'Help' category, you would use:

<nowiki>[[Category:Help|Categories]]</nowiki>

Note that we used 'Categories' as the sort parameter. Without this the page would be listed under 'H' for 'Help:Categories', instead of under 'C', which is more useful. Other situations where you might want to use the sort parameter is when you have articles about people that are titled as <code>FirstName LastName</code> but within the category you want them listed as <code>LastName, FirstName</code>.

Another way to sort the article in the correct letter without the namespace is

<nowiki>[[Category:Help|{{SUBPAGENAME}}]]</nowiki>

This is extremely helpful when using templates which include a category tag. ...

''Note: the SORT parameter does '''not''' affect how the page title is displayed within the category listing, just how it is ordered. In the above example, the link to this page will still be 'Help:Categories', and not 'Categories' as you might expect!''

== Linking to Category Pages ==

To create a link to a category page:

<nowiki>[[:Category:NAME]]</nowiki>

If you were linking to the Category Page for Help on MediaWiki, the link would look like this: [[:Category:Help]]

If you want to display alternate text for the link:

<nowiki>[[:Category:NAME|TEXT]]</nowiki>

Here is an example of the same link to the Category Page for Help on MediaWiki as above, but with alternative text: [[:Category:Help|MediaWiki Help Index]]

== Categorize Categories==

Categories themselves and other uploaded files like Pictures can be categorized exactly like normal pages. It is useful to connect the article-categories with categories already in place to establish connections and hierarchies. To this end, after saving the article, follow the category links at the end of the page to see, if the category is already in place and if not, categorize them until you connect them with an existing category.

==Moving categories==
Categories cannot be easily moved [[Help:Moving a page|like other pages]]. For this reason, category names should be chosen carefully.

The easiest way (for those with admin privileges) is to create the new page, delete the old one, and then change the tags in each member of the category (manually or with a bot). However, this loses the page history - not a huge problem when categories are used only for navigation, but when a wiki is structured differently and the category pages contain significant amounts of text, this is undesirable.

=== Moving with revision history ===
However, category pages ''can'' be moved together with the full revision history, with some effort, by using the [[Special:Export]] and [[Special:Import]] functions.

{{Languages|Help:Categories}}
[[Category:Help|Categories]]

Help:Searching

2008-06-15T12:58:14Z

Kingboyk: Removing inappropriate interwiki link and copyrighted image from *portable, public domain* help page

{{PD Help Page}}
The quickest way to find information in MediaWiki is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a '''Search''' box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search".

<div style="border:1px solid #ababff; background: #fdfdff; padding: 1em; margin: 1.1em 1em 1em 0em; font-size:105%">
Put your keyword in the searchbox.
* <font face="MS Sans Serif,Arial">'''Go'''</font> - (or ''Enter'' on keyboard) will take you automatically to the article, if it exists.
* <font face="MS Sans Serif,Arial">'''Search'''</font> - will search the text of all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below).
</div>

If you clicked 'search', or you clicked 'go' and the page you were looking for did not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that matched your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).

== How it works ==
Here's how the search works:

* Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
* The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click 'edit', not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
* Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. e.g., if you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
* The search is not case-sensitive, so "MediaWiki", "mediawiki" and "MEDIAWIKI" all give the same result.

== Restricting the search ==
If you click the 'Search' button without filling in anything, you will be taken to 'Special:Search' which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list)

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular [[Help:Namespaces|namespace]] e.g., only search within the 'Talk' pages. Tick the namespaces you require for this search.

By default only the [[Help:Namespaces|namespaces]] specified in your [[Help:Preferences|preferences]] will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the 'search' section of user preferences.

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{{Languages|Help:Searching}}

[[Category:Help|Searching]]
[[Category:Search]]

DWPriests - User contributions [en]

Help:Categories

Help:Searching