Unreal Wiki:Categories

Unreal Wiki makes use of categories to group pages about similar topics. See Help:Categories for technical information about using and creating them.

When to use categories

Categories, along with cross-references and info boxes, help users find information, even if they don't that it exists or what it's called.

Almost every article in the main and engine-specific namespaces should belong in at least one category. The categories to be included, which serve as clasification, should be the significant (useful) topics to which the article belongs as a member, and where users are most likely to look if they can't remember the name of the thing they are trying to look for.

An example:

Article: UE2:ONSPowerCoreBlue

Useful categories: Category:UT2004 Classes, Category:Onslaught Mapping

Not as useful: Category:Classes starting with the Letter O

Questions to ask to determine whether it is appropriate to add an article to a category:

• If the category does not already exist, is it possible to write a few paragraphs or more on the subject of the category, explaining it?
• If you go to the article from the category, will it be obvious why the article was put in the category? Is the category subject prominently discussed in the article?
• Does the category fit into the overall category system? Categories that don't fit are often deleted.

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then the category is probably inappropriate. Note that it is always appropriate to add articles to categories that fit into well established taxonomies. For example, every article about an UnrealScript class is categorized in some [[Category:Game name classes]] category, which is in turn categorized in Category:Classes by game.

Guidelines

Some general guidelines

• Categories are mainly used to browse through similar articles. Make decisions about the structure of categories and subcategories that make it easy for users to browse through similar articles.
• Usually, articles should not be in both a category and its subcategory.
• Check to see where siblings of the article reside. If there are few if any articles in a category, the article probably belongs in one of the subcategories.
• Articles should be placed in categories with the same name. However, the article and the category do not have to be categorized the same way. The article can also be placed in categories populated with similar articles. The category can be put into categories populated with similar subcategories.
• Generally, the relationship between an article and its categories should be definable as "(Article) is (category)": TeamCannon is a UT class, Add an actor is a basic procedure, etc. Do not apply categories whose relationship to the topic is definable only as "(Article) is a subject related to (category)", such as filing a navigation point class directly into Category:Mapping. Similarly, categorize articles by characteristics of the topic, not characteristics of the article: a tutorial article about mapping for a specific gametype, for example, does not belong in Category:Tutorial.
• Bend the rules above when it makes sense, especially when it is the best solution that can be found under the circumstances.

Categories vs. Info Boxes

Categories are not the only way to organize articles. Another commonly used feature are info boxes. Info boxes are templates that often automatically add the article to a certain category.

Categories do not form a tree

Each article can appear in more than one category and each category can in turn appear in more than one parent category. There are multiple categorization schemes that can be applied simultaneously. In other words, categories do not form a strict hierarchy, but a more general structure called a directed acyclic graph, or at least close to that. (see below)

Still, some parts of the category system will be very tree-like with multiple categories belonging to only one parent category. The best way to think about it is in the form of multiple overlapping tree structures. When applying the guidelines described above, consider every overlapping tree independently.

Cycles should usually be avoided

The MediaWiki software powering Unreal Wiki does not prevent cycles (loops) and can handle them, they should still be avoided most of the time. We don't plan on going as far with the category system as, for example, Wikipedia does, so this shouldn't really be a problem here.