As I'm sure many of you have already noticed, User:MettytheCutiefly has been merging and removing a lot of categories from pages. This is part of an effort to clean up the wiki and remove a large amount of entirely unnecessary content.
Why?[]
Categories are intended as a way to group pages into easily identifiable groups, which makes navigating the wiki easier. For years, people have instead used categories almost as a tagging system, sticking tons of categories - which have no other pages in them - on their pages. This makes scrolling the categories useless and rather annoying.
What's Changing?[]
Going forward, categories should be something that people are likely to actually search for, and should be fairly general. For example...
Bad Examples[]
- Evil People
- Literally just a different way to say Category:Villains
- AK-47 Users
- Too specific. Nobody's going to search for that. Stick to something more broad like Category:Weapon Users
- Math Wizards
- Nobody cares, nerd... But seriously nobody cares and the only purpose a category like this will have is for trolls to find pages to make fun of.
Good Examples[]
- Heroes
- Simple, broad but still useful. Very likely to have additional pages that fall under this category.
- Weapon Users
- Just specific enough to specify that this character uses a weapon, but we don't need to go into more detail than that.
- Sword Users
- This is about as specific as we'd ever want to get with categories. It's a general type of weapon, but still broad enough that there should be plenty of pages that still fall under this category.
What about personal categories?[]
This one's a big change, but the wiki will be better for it!
Personal categories are categories that belong to a particular user. A lot of people make categories like FlippantFeline's Characters or The Flippy Family. While there's nothing inherently wrong with these names, this is a big wiki, and it gets cluttered very quickly. These categories quickly get lost in the mess of other categories, and people searching may never have a clue that it's what they're looking for.
We've come up with a better way. From now on, these kinds of categories should be set up like this:
Owner Categories[]
For a category to put everything you own, simply name it Owner:<Your Name>, like Owner:FlippantFeline
Personal Categories[]
For other categories, like for specifically your characters, or maybe a family you have, put it as a child to the category you made above like Owner:<Your Name>/Characters.
Why?[]
This will cause two things to happen. First, the categories will end up sorting next to each other in the category list. Second, your personal categories will automatically get a link back to your main owner category at the top.
