Help talk:Categories

Digraph order
Hello: I'm making a dictionary with entries for the digraph "ch" and I want to differentiate the entries for the letter "c", how could I do that in the "dictionary" adding the "ch" in alphabetical order after the "c" in a wiki category ?

Sub-categorising
Should anyone add information here on how to put one category under another (subcategory)?
 * This was done a while back (but since the question was asked) --HappyDog 16:35, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The explanation about how to add subcategories is unclear. I inserted comments directly into the article highlighting the ambiguities. 66.220.233.173 19:33, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hiding categories
How does one hide category display?


 * You can hide the category links at the bottom of a page using CSS (e.g. ).  --HappyDog 01:36, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

But how does one hide an article (or something like a template) from being included within a category?

Hiding categories from category pages
I am using MediaWiki 1.15.1 and would like to hide some categories even from category pages, something which is impossible right now, AFAIK. Reason: I use categories as dynamic table of contents and the categories I want to hide are shortcut redirects, then are just maintenance.

Is it possible? Is it in the queue line for implementation? FYI, here's the ticket I started at MediaZilla.

Thanks!

David Latapie 08:59, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Hiding the Main Page category
Is it possible to hide the category on the main page, but not on other pages? Regards, Guido den Broeder 10:31, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Found it myself. The css should contain: body.Page-main_Page #catlinks { display : none } Guido den Broeder 11:24, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Intro
I think it's important to define what a Category is. It could be placed before the help section where it explains how to add a category, as a noob might not know what the Category does. Just a suggestion. --Hawkwynd 12:23, 24 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. It's a wiki, so feel free to add this kind of text yourself!  In the meantime, I've added a rough-and-ready intro.  Please tweak it if you feel the need. --HappyDog 16:35, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

second independent category system
I want to introduce a second category system in my wiki or let me call it an "advanced Tag-System". The idea is to tag every page with some words as links - similiar to the categorie syntax. When I then click this words, I want to see a page with the content of "what links here". Besides this I want to keep the standard category tree. Have anyone has an idea, how to realize this? --87.162.127.221 13:43, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Try Semantic MediaWiki? --141.14.26.125 08:21, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Language
Could someone please add a guide on how one can change the name "Category" into something localised in other languages? --David Munch 14:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I would think that would be the "MediaWiki:Categories" page of your wiki; accessible via "Special:Allmessages". --Lance May 12:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

ไทยไหญ่ นายปี (talk) 17:25, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorting question...
In an interesting display, I have managed to thoroughly confuse myself with categories. When sorting using the "" suggestion, I've gotten my templates to exhibit the appropriate behavior. The category is "Templates", and the namespace is the default "Template". This works perfectly. However, when I tried this with another category (originally the same name in category as in namespace), they simply sort by the namespace. I've since renamed the category and left the namespace the same. It still sorts by the namespace. The only difference in the two situations that I can see now is that the problematic pages are also tied to another category. Do categories not sort if the pages are attached to more than one? --Lance May 18:04, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay, so just in case there are others out there who may have a similar issue. Any level of pride does not prohibit me from saying that the issue above was not only my fault, it was my complete ignorance of the product's features. Essentially, I had expected that namespaces would be created just as any other page; through usage. Granted, this would not be feasible in situations like Wikipedia, so I can see why it is not that way. So that is what the delta was between the two situations; one was a real namespace and had a, the other was not and did not. However, in the interest of possibly lending a hand to anyone else running across this issue, please see Manual:$wgExtraNamespaces before just creating "Something:Like_this", as it will not become a namespace without setting it up ahead of time.

in pages categorized via templates
I'm facing a problem to which I haven't yet found any answer or solution: in a wiki I collaborate to, we have a kind of pages that are categorized in two different ways: When I decided for DEFAULTSORT in place of the old procedure of manually inserting a sort key in each category tag (and for the templates, by passing the sort key as parameter), I discovered that DEFAULTSORT only works for the categories local to the page, but not for the ones inserted by the templates. Is there a way to change this behavior and force all categories to follow DEFAULTSORT? Even a tweak in the wiki code would be welcome! Thanks --Capmo 21:49, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) via directly receiving category tags (say,  ), and
 * 2) by receiving templates that categorize the page indirectly (i.e.: templates   that insert the page in categories  ).


 * should apply also to categories included via templates. However, keep in mind that it's the default sort key: any explicitly specified sort key will override it.  —Ilmari Karonen 22:58, 14 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply, you were right: some of the templates had a sortkey code defined in them that was preventing DEFAULTSORT from working properly. It was something like this: . When no sortkey was passed as parameter, the "magic word" PAGENAME would become active and override DEFAULTSORT. When I removed all that and left only   everything worked fine! Capmo 04:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Changing items listed per category
I know I can place the following global variable into LocalSettings.php

$wgCategoryPagingLimit = 600;

To alter all categories in a Wiki.

But someone said that the latest MediaWiki now allows this to be done on a per category basis?

If so, does anyone know the magic word I add into a category page to do this?

I can't find it listed.

--Stuart Halliday 12:10, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Sort by more than one character
What if I want to sort by year? If I do it will be listed on the :Category:Year page under "2", right along with articles in I would rather have it be listed under "2009," so that "2008" shows up separately.


 * I had the same desire, with the addition that I wanted it to be controllable. So I wanted to be able to either provide a specific sort or else I wanted one to be automatically found (based on the first character). I searched around, but couldn't find anything that worked for me. What I ended up doing was just modifying the library code (bad; I know.)
 * In ../includes/CategoryPage.php I modified the "addPage" function to be;

/** function addPage( $title, $sortkey, $pageLength, $isRedirect = false ) { global $wgContLang; $titletext = $wgContLang->convert( $title->getPrefixedText ); $this->articles[] = $isRedirect ? ' ' . $this->getSkin->makeKnownLinkObj( $title, $titletext ). ' '		: $this->getSkin->makeSizeLinkObj( $pageLength, $title, $titletext ); if($wgContLang->firstChar( $sortkey )=="("){		$this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( trim($sortkey,"") );	}else{		$this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( $wgContLang->firstChar( $sortkey ) );	} }
 * Add a miscellaneous page
 * This change allows a sort key to be wrapped in parentheis, in which case the key is fully displayed in the category list. For example, the following would list the page under a key of "2009" instead of just "2".


 * I'm sure there's a much better way to acheive this same result. Modifying the base library code is never something that should be done and the code above is far from "good" (for example, a key of "(2009 (June))" would result in "2009 (June" instead of "2009 (June)" as would be desired.) But it gets the job done (or does so enough for my needs.) Hopefully someone with more knowledge/experience could offer a more agreeable solution...? --Dlhdesign 00:49, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Here a modified version of the above "if"-statement that let's you sort the articles within the "headlines":

if($wgContLang->firstChar( $sortkey )=="("){			$closepar=strpos($sortkey, ")"); $sortkey=substr($sortkey, 0, $closepar); $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( trim($sortkey,"("));
 * This let's you add text behind the closing parenthesis, by which the articles are sorted within their groups.
 * e.g.: comes before  in the 2009 section.
 * The recommended use would be, to give the pagetitle, so that the articles are in alphabetical order.
 * Sidcom 17:55, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The above solution worked for me as of MediaWiki version 1.17.0. Thanks! Just wanted to pop in and let people know that it still works. For additional clarity, here's the code in full:

function addPage( $title, $sortkey, $pageLength, $isRedirect = false ) { global $wgContLang; $titletext = $wgContLang->convert( $title->getPrefixedText ); $this->articles[] = $isRedirect ? ' ' . $this->getSkin->makeKnownLinkObj( $title, $titletext ). ' '     : $this->getSkin->makeSizeLinkObj( $pageLength, $title, $titletext ); if($wgContLang->firstChar( $sortkey )=="("){     $closepar=strpos($sortkey, ")"); $sortkey=substr($sortkey, 0, $closepar); $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( trim($sortkey,"("));   }else{      $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( $wgContLang->firstChar( $sortkey ) );    }  }
 * --Cameronmalek 02:12, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

And what if I want a subcategory to be listed in a parent category by a different name? For example, I have Category 2009 as a subcategory of Articles, and instead of 2009 showing up on the Category:Articles page under subcategory header 2 I want it to be listed under subcategory header Year.
 * The same solution as above could be done for the sub-category listings. Modify the "getSubcategorySortChar" function on the same page to return a different result when the key is surrounded by parenthesis and then modify the category definition on the sub-category page to include the parenthesis. for example, in the 2009 category page, include the following:


 * --Dlhdesign 00:56, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

And what if I want to list the same article in the same category with multiple keys? If I do: It will only appear once on the :Category:Author page, under "A". I would like the Author page in this case to list a header "Aleph" and all pages with him listed as an author, and a separate header "Gammow" with the same.


 * I know it doesn't work to put the same category twice, even with different sort keys. In fact, there's a cleanup project that's identifying articles like that, so that it can be corrected.
 * One thing you can do (and I don't know if this fits what you had in mind) is put categories on redirect pages. Two examples are the English Wikipedia pages for Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, which both redirect to Ashford & Simpson. The redirect pages for their individual names have default sort keys for their individual names, and include categories that apply to them as individuals. One category listed on both pages is "Living people", so they'd appear separately in that category. Does that help? --Auntof6 23:14, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The SQL table which stores the category links (aptly named "categorylinks") has a unique key on cl_from and cl_to, which means that a single page can only link to a particular category once. This is likely "enforced" in the parse code by using a unique key in an array or something (I didn't look for it in the code, so am not sure on that bit.) So in your example above, the "Gammow" key overwrites/replaces the "Aleph" key before it even gets saved to the DB.
 * In theory, you could further modify the "getPage" and "getSubcategorySortChar" to look for a splittable list and then have it add a unique "page" for each split item. For example, you could provide a key of "Aleph,Gammow" which would then split the key on the comma and list the page under both the "A" and "G" keys. Or (extending the above), you could provide a key of "(Aleph),(Gammow)" and it could list it under the full keys. You would likely need to decide how to deal with the key counts, since the visible number of links would be different than the true counts. I'd personally just change the text to list them as "unique pages" or the like, but there are other options there as well...
 * The final modification would then be to adjust the parser so that duplicate sort keys on the same category link result in a joined session key. This joined key would then be stored in the DB as if it had been passed in above, making your above syntax correct. --Dlhdesign 01:24, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Any way the library could be interrupted through extensions? Seems it would be much better to make an extension to do this than hacking the source file that handles this.Goldbishop 01:51, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Just created Extension:CategorySortHeaders. Requires MediaWiki 1.19 though (on 1.17 and 1.18 can work with a much less scary patch). Bawolff 07:47, 25 June 2011 (UTC)


 * If you still want to use a hack in the code, I improved to accept inner parentheis (the outer-most delimits the sortkey).

/** * Add a miscellaneous page */ function addPage( $title, $sortkey, $pageLength, $isRedirect = false ) { global $wgContLang;

$link = Linker::link( $title ); if ( $isRedirect ) { // This seems kind of pointless given 'mw-redirect' class, // but keeping for back-compatiability with user css. $link = ' '. $link. ' ';	}	$this->articles[] = $link;

// *** HACK *** // /* ---OLD--- * / $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( 		$this->collation->getFirstLetter( $sortkey ) ); /* ---OLD--- */ /* ---NEW--- */ $match = array; if(preg_match('/\((.+)\)/', $sortkey, $match)) { $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( $this->collation->getSortKey( $match[1] ) ); }else{ $this->articles_start_char[] = $wgContLang->convert( $this->collation->getFirstLetter( $sortkey ) ); }	/* ---NEW--- */ }
 * 177.17.154.145 22:35, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Sort numbers by more than one character

 * I read the above "solutions" about sorting but I think I'm having a different problem.
 * e.g. I have two categories, one is called "Test 90" one is "Test 100". Those two categories belong to the category "Numbers". There they are sorted this way: T --> first "Test 100" and THEN "Test 90". So MediaWiki seems to look from character to character (and in this case numbers) which makes the sorting very wrong. Does anyone have a solution for this? This would be awesome! --SmartK 14:41, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * General technique that is beneficial is to use same number of digits (e.g. Test 100, Test 090), then it forces the computer to index correctly. Similarly, putting dates in a YYYYMMDD format will always group by the larger bucket, ie year, then month, then day). hope that helps.

Sorting Categories by date
By default a category page display the related items according to the letters Is it possible to change it to dates, years and months
 * The answer is no. Sorting is by alphabetical order of the sort key, always. One can do a manual approximation of a sort by "dates, years and months", providing a sort key which, when sorted alphabetically, yields the desired result. For example, articles named "A1", "A2" and "A3" categorized, respectively, with:


 * A1:
 * A2:
 * A3:


 * would be listed under Category:C in the following order:


 * A3
 * A2
 * A1


 * However, they would all be grouped under heading "2", because all the sort keys start be "2". If one of the dates is "1999 01 03", that page would be grouped under the separate heading "1" because it starts by "1". To ensure all pages were sorted under one single heading, you need to start all sort keys by the same caracter, so "*20100903", "*20100902", "*20100901" and "*19990103" would be sorted in one single groupd under heading "*" because they all start by "*". All the sort keys have to be created and maintained by users manually. Hamilton Abreu 00:27, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
 * cough dpl. (I only mention it since that was the original use case for the extension. Wikinews uses that extension extensively to give pseudo-category listings by date) You can also sort by date the category was added to the page using the api if you don't mind the non-pretty interface. Bawolff

How to remove a category
- Hello ! I cannot find it. I know that there are other rules than on the pages but is there a possibility to remove category that is no longer needed ?
 * - Simply remove all occurrences of a category on wiki pages and the category will automatically disappear. -- Satri 12:53, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If the category page had text on it it still appears in Special pages -> Categories -> Unused categories. 132.177.122.112 19:59, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Category aliases / multi-language categories / grouping categories
- We have a wiki in multiple languages. We want some categories to be grouped together, such as a "City" category (English) and a "Ville" category (French). At the moment, the two categories are distinct. Does anyone knows how we could automatically "group" these two categories to act as a single one? (ideally without having to add the two categories to a page) Thanks. -- Satri 13:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * - won't a redirect work for this? -- Oo.et.oO 18:48, 28 November 2010 (UTC)


 * - No, a redirect from one category page to another category page will not add the categorized pages to the second target category, so this doesn't work. Thanks for trying to find a solution. -- Satri 21:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Space a sort key using DEFAULTSORT
It appears that using a single space as sort key doesn't work using the DEFAULTSORT variable, i.e. simply gets ignored. Is there some way to work around this? __Meco 22:34, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Use (In case your wondering, &amp;#32; is space as space is character number 32 in ascii/unicode). I'm not sure if defaultsort should really be trimming spaces like that. This could potentially be a bug. Bawolff 03:53, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Categories not appearing
I'm attempting to add categories to several pages on the Venture Bros. Wiki and for some reason they are not appearing. I'm typing them in correctly and everything, does anyone know how to fix this? Uncle Tyrone

Let users choose categories in the drop down manner
I want to allow my users to choose the category in the dropdown fashion in the article, is it possible to achieve this through some extension, if so, what extension?


 * semantic media wiki w/ semantic forms
 * --Oo.et.oO 03:27, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Can I put multiple categories in one tag?
This is how it is right now: can i put all categories in one tag? Something like that:


 * No (unless there's some extension floating around somewhere for this). —Emufarmers(T 18:39, 17 December 2010 (UTC)


 * See now Extension:ArrayExtension. Cavila (MW 1.17, MySQL 5.1.57, Php 5.2.17) 18:25, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

How do I hide a specific category?
At the end of the article I have list of categories om my article. I want to hide specifically one category from my guests how do I go about doing this? If it is possible that is.


 * Please refer to Help:Categories. Hamilton Abreu 14:11, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I can´t access my categories
Hallo, after upgrating with SMWHalo i can´t navigate over categoties. Eachtime then I am clicking a category i recive thei error: Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in C:\aaaaaa\wiki\includes\GlobalFunctions.php on line 1369

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class SMWWikiPageValue in C:\aaaaaa\wiki\extensions\SemanticMediaWiki\includes\SMW_DV_WikiPage.php on line 378 why? Thanks, 87.139.141.76 08:20, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Don't show "Category:"-Namespace in Subcategory Section
Does anyone know, how to make MW not show "Category:foo", but only "foo" in the subcategories section? I do have a working 1.15.1 Version, that doesn't show it and a 1.17 that does. I can't find any documented configuration setting that documents this and I couldn't find a relevant difference in the settings so far. I do however believe to remember, that this was a feature ;) of the 1.15.1 Version only - but how do I reproduce it then? --Sidcom 20:57, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Sub Category
Hi. I was wondering about sub-categories. Is it possible to have several sub-categories named the same? For example if I have two game categories (I run a gaming site) where one is called World of Warcraft and the other is called Runes of Magic, and then I want a sub-category in both of them called "Class Guides".

So it would look like Category:World of Warcraft -> (sub)category:Class Guides and at the same time have Category:Runes of Magic -> (sub)Category:Class Guides.
 * No, but you can call them Category:World of Warcraft:Class Guides and Category:Runes of Magic:Class Guides respectively. Regards, Guido den Broeder 23:25, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

I have similar question: I have the same page title, for several groups encoded as Categories. How can I organize that. For example, I have two groups (two categories): Category:Bank and Category:Computer, I would like to create two different Event pages for each group. How can I do that?

Query Categories
Is there any way to make a category page that can perform something like a basic SQL query on various categories? For example, I have a Wiki with pages for various books, movies, albums, etc. Each page has a category for what form of media it is (book/movie/etc.), what year it came out in, and the genres and themes it covers. Is there a way to make a category page that shows me just movies from the 1980s that feature time travel? Thanks! --TheAlmightyGuru 21:42, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I think you need a Semantic MediaWiki for this. With those you can do combined searches. ReplicationWiki-fan (talk) 13:21, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Displaying entries on category page.
I have about 150 entries that are a person's name. I've flagged all of these for a specific category and use their last name as a sort key. This works great for keeping all the Smith's under the "S" subheading.

However, is there a way to indicate how each entry should be displayed on the category page?

For instance, I'd like "John Smith" to appear under the "S" category, but listed as "Smith, John".

Thanks!

Sort in reverse order
There are articles A and B in the category C. They are sorted according to ASCII - A then B. As I can sort the articles in one category in reverse order? B then A. Or not 1,2,3 but 3,2,1.
 * Maybe there's something in Category:Category extensions that allows you to do that, but not anything I'm aware of. It would make sense if for instance, your category contains a lot of dates and you want to start with the most recent one. You could consider Extension:Semantic MediaWiki, with which you can build queries and choose a suitable output format, including MediaWiki categories in reverse order. Cavila MW 1.17, MySQL 5.5.16, Php 5.3.8 21:52, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Add a page to a variable category
Is it possible to use a template to add a page to a category? Using the following code on a template called by a page does not work, even if the variable is set:

Use TEMPLATE output as Sortkey
I'm currently trying to use a the output of a self written TEMPLATE as a Sortkey, but I doesn't seem to work. On our Wiki all pagenames start with a cetrain String "CU-01_". E.g. a page about design guidelines is named "CU-01_Design-Guidelines". When we add this page to a category it is listed under "C" rather than "D" (for Design Guidelines). Of course it would be possible to add the page to the category by using  and force the sorting algorythm to place the page under "D", but this way we would have to set the Sortkey manually on each page. One solution would be the use of namespaces, but as the wiki has grown larger over time, restructuring it isn't really an option. Using some Wiki String-templates I tried to come up with a more flexible solution. If I include  into the page, it shows "Design-Guidelines" which is exactly the Sortkey I want to use, but   does not seem to work. In fact with this change the pagename isn't sorted on the category page at all. Is it not possible to use the TEMPLATE output as a Sortkey or am I missing something?
 * That should work, I don't know why it doesn't for you (Try running it through something like special:expandtemplates to see what happens [that's an extension]). You could also change this programatically by using the GetDefaultSortkey hook, which can alter how the default sortkey is calculated. Bawolff (talk) 16:28, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Pictures of pages in Category
Can the picture of the subcategories links be changed? For example, some of the subcategories on this page are of the relevant flag, but others are of text... Adam 13 cato (talk) 19:17, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
 * That appears to be an extension (maybe CategoryGalleries) that wikia uses. You would have to ask the people who maintain that extension. Bawolff (talk) 16:24, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Top Ten pages within a category
Hi Guys,

i have created a media wiki and used categorization to organize it. the front page is broken into four rows looking like this

also at the bottom is the link to the popular pages, however these are all the pages on the wiki using  the offset is the main page

what i would like to do is have each of these four rows containing the popular pages within that category. I have looked everywhere but cant find any syntax that will allow me to use popular pages within another if that makes sense?
 * I guess Extension:DynamicPageList_%28Wikimedia%29 sorting by popularity should help you. ReplicationWiki-fan (talk) 14:47, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

default sort key - still including namespace?
The page says in the "Sort key" section:


 * By default, a page is sorted within a category under the first letter of its full name including the namespace.

This would mean that for example Template:Foo would be listed under "T".

Is this still valid? I somehow doubt - at least on a 1.19.x wiki I'm maintaining the sort is done by the page name _without_ the namespace, which means Template:Foo is listed under "F". --Cboltz (talk) 22:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It has been changed but I don’t know when. Now you don’t have a namespace in the sort key. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 03:30, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Can this be reversed? I'd like to actually include the namespace in sorting. --Chazbot7 (talk) 21:03, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Did you try something like ? That should handle the namespace over to DEFAULTSORT. - --Ulf Dunkel (talk) 16:24, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Link to category AND include the page in it?
Is there a way to do this?

For example, if I have a page named "Apple" and I want to link to categories "juice" and "fruit" AND include it in the two categories, how can I do this? Will I have to add the categories manually, or is there a way to automatically add a page to the categories it links to?

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 * As explained on the help page, you link to a category with Category:XYZ, and add a page to a category with Category:XYZ . Both in one is not possible as far as I know. ReplicationWiki-fan (talk) 14:15, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Hiding articles in category page
Is it possible to hide list of articles in one category page? Example:

I have a main-category named "MAIN". This category has 2 sub-categories - "NPC" and "QUESTS". I'd like to have an article "Quest1" in categories: "MAIN" and "QUESTS", but I don't want it to be listed on "MAIN" category page. Is this possible?

Placing Categories list on a Page?
I want to have someone click a category, got to a page, then on that page have categories of all pages that are of this category. I am not see how to do this.

Basically The main category is Genres. When you click this a list of pages that are definitions of diff genres come up. Then when you click a genre, after the descript, I like to have a list of all artists in this genre. Possible?


 * Did you mean subcategories or a link to category page? Or transclusion? --wargo (talk) 20:55, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Disable grouping by first letter with fewer than X pages
I have many categories with only a few pages right now, so the grouping of pages by first letter is overkill. Can you set a threshold, e.g. don't group a category's pages by first letter if there are under 25 pages? --Jabbett (talk) 19:24, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Hidden Categories list
Is it possible to eliminate the hidden categories list and make all hidden categories show up in the normal list of categories at the bottom of the page (assuming you as a user have them visible)? Schiffy (talk) 21:00, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

گزارش
منتظمین اس کا اردو ترجمہ کریں--جنجوعہ راجپوت (talk) 10:53, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Disabling Category Creation...
I'm having a bit of a problem with my user-base who seem to have the tendency to create categories rather than creating pages, then attaching their content to the category page. I've tried to find some setting that would restrict this for the User group, but I can't find anything.

Comments?

David


 * You could use $wgNamespaceProtection. --Nemo 17:50, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Case sensitivity
The part that says "Sort keys are case-sensitive" seems outdated. It contradicts the info at Help:Sorting, which says, "Categories are sorted different from other lists. How exactly they are sorted depends on the configuration of the wiki, via $wgCategoryCollation. The default since MediaWiki 1.17 is the Unicode code point order like above, but with all the lowercase letters turned into uppercase letters. More complex orderings are also possible." --Paul 012 (talk) 09:39, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Bulk creation of categories
Is there a way to bulk create categories? I have a list of a thousand I want to add to my own Wiki, and it would take a long time manually. --Iantresman (talk) 12:30, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * What about using Extension:Data Transfer? Cavila 08:19, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Looks promising, I wasn't aware of it. Thanks. --Iantresman (talk) 22:00, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Category not linked
using MW 1.26.2 and SMW 2.3.1 with SemanticForms 3.4.2-a On some old pages linking (registered in categorylinks) to a category still works. On nearly all new pages, the link to category-page exists but even by editing the page it will not generate a categorylink an these pages aren't shown from the category-page. SemanticForms don't want to use the edit-with-form (obviously not finding the page in categorylink)

The category-link is embedded by template, but even setting a category in pagetext woudn't work. So it seems to me a general problem - but putting a sandbox-page in category, will list the page ... sometimes.

Im confused and can't find a solution. Any help? Any ideas, what might cause the mistake? --Letofred (talk) 13:22, 5 March 2016 (UTC)


 * This is a known issue. The solution can be found on Manual:$wgRunJobsAsync! --87.123.33.228 14:50, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Category nomenclature in Mediawiki
The current nomenclature of categories in Mediawiki is a cause of confusion for new comers. It should be changed.

Categories in Mediawiki are not a tree, but a graph. Hence describing categories as "sub-categories" of others is confusing, at least for non-native speakers like, but more importantly this confusion is carried over to translations of the UI due to the authority of the English text.

For example, in any category page we find the message "This category has the following subcategories" while it could better be "The following categories are categorised on this category" or simply "This category has the following categories"

--Ahmad Gharbeia أحمد غربية (talk) 09:32, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Sort with additional letters
I have a wiki and would like to sort category pages in an order specific to Lushootseed (lut), a language with both accented letters and digraphs. Here is a sample of a few letters I need in that order:


 * ʔ a b c c̓ č č̓ d dᶻ e ə ...

What is the easiest way to do that? Right now, the letters are all over the place (from the point of view of normal Lushootseed alphabetization) and it's impossible to find a lot of the words. --BB12 (talk) 02:26, 23 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi Benjamin. Unfortunately, there's no 'uca-lut', but see Manual:$wgCategoryCollation for what is currently possible. Cavila 13:03, 25 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the response. I've looked at that page several times. It doesn't seem likely that Lushootseed will make it to that list for at least another 10 or 20 years. It would be nice to have a global setting where I could set the desired order. --BLebow4500 (talk) 23:01, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Typo
under the first list each category is listed again -> under the first list each category is listed against

Thanks 160.83.42.136 08:15, 18 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for reporting this, but I'm not sure this is a typo. The text reads: "If $wgUseCategoryBrowser is set to true, under the first list each category is listed again, breadcrumb-style, with all its parent categories, sorted alphabetically." Perhaps it should be rephrased: "When is set to   a second list of categories is displayed below the first, displaying the breadcrumb trail to each category (sorted alphabetically)." Would that improve understanding? Sam Wilson 02:18, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Pages not appearing in a category
There are cases when pages don't appear on a category page which then says "This category currently contains no pages or media.".

Perhaps this has to do with jobs not being carried out and could be covered. --JamesPoulson (talk) 07:48, 9 December 2016 (UTC)


 * This indeed has something to do with the job queue. Nowadays category propagation is done using jobs. The best is to create a cronjob for this task to be performed on a regular basis. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 07:41, 26 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Even when I run runJobs.php the page doesn't show up on the category page. The category does show on the page itself. MW 1.28.2 --AdSvS 14:51, 6 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Interesting. MW 1.28.2 should be ok. 1.28.0 and 1.28.1 were broken as current master is. Let's hope for the best. --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 12:59, 6 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Still not working for me. Version 1.3. 0 jobs in queue. Getting same "no pages" error. --Johnywhy (talk) 19:05, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Descriptions
Can I add descriptions to category pages? 2601:648:8303:2680:4AC:7C:13DA:6A64 00:29, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Just edit them, description will appear at top of pages list. --wargo (talk) 18:57, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

PHP questions: What does the __HIDDENCAT__ do exactly?

 * How MediaWiki recognize if a category is hidden or not from the PHP side?
 * Why  is not equivalent of  ?

Thanks, I'm curious :) --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 23:42, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

How to list the whole pages in a category without (previous page) (next page) ?
In a category I have a long list of pages but the category is divised in several pages with (previous page) (next page)

Is it possible to disable the paging ?

Many thanks

Alex

Count (number) of Category members is wrong, how to fix it?
There a an category I can count manually 524 members, but MW saying there are 572 members. I know how to fix whole page count (via php updateArticleCount.php --update), But I don't know category count, how to fix it? help me please.

Category with too many pages listed after runJobs.php
Via a script i added the tag ||category:test|| to a predefined list of pages (half of the wiki). After that i run the runJobs.php script to update the links table. When i now open the Category:test page there are more pages listet than in the predefined list. And if i edit one of these false linked pages, there is no ||category:test|| tag in there. So i have no opportunity to remove the false cateogry (or linking between page and category) How can i get rid of the false linked pages on the category:test page?

Pages don't appear in categories after an XML dump import
Problem related to this topic and this topic. When will this bug be fixed ? Users can't launch the refreshLinks.php script after an XML import... Thanks in advance ! --Megajoule (talk) 09:53, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Hidden categories magic wears
When a page that is categorised on a hidden category is viewed by a non-logged-in visitor, then the hidden categories of the page are not displayed, which is the expected behaviour.

But once a non-logged-in visitor arrives at a hidden category page, and assuming this hidden category is categorised on other hidden categories (or assuming that category:hidden categories itself was made hidden), then the visitor is able to see the "hidden categories" group of links at the bottom of the page and discover the hidden categories of the page.

So it's like the magic spell is broken and hiding no longer works, once a visitor lands at a hidden category page.

Is this by design? If so, shuldn't it be documented?

--Ahmad Gharbeia أحمد غربية (talk) 22:13, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Index for categories with many entries
I have a category with more than 1000 entries that are listed on more than 5 pages. I put the alphabet on top of each page so that users can click to the letter they are searching for quickly. The code I used is however probably not the shortest and I thought there might be a nicer solution. I think I've seen that somewhere but could not find how to use it. Probably it would be a helpful option to have it on the help page. ReplicationWiki-fan (talk) 13:27, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Hiding the Category Prefix on a Category Page
Hi all,

I am looking at removing the Category: prefix when viewing a category page.

I have found this but it doesn't seem to do what I want. Is this possible?

I have found an extension, but it is no longer actively maintained.

Any help is appreciated.

Gary

--Squeak24 (talk) 17:37, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Delete contributions
How do you delete contributions which are not authorized? Bryanz4utoo (talk) 12:19, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Shell?
In the text it says "If you have shell access". But "shell" is a linux/unix-term which isnt used at all in the windows-world afaik.

To describe it more universal and also for beginners to understand may also to link to the article, I'd suggest to write "If you have access to the Configuration-file" and also link to Manual:Configuration_settings.

Removing category from a page
How do I automatically remove a category from a page? Based on creation date, for example. Or is this a DPL question? Bcjohnston (talk) 15:28, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Something is terribly wrong with the "Tracking Categories" section of this page.
See the screenshot: what are we looking at here, why can't we fix it, and why are the links within it all wrong??



DEFAULTSORT doesn't properly sort by key
I wonder what I am doing wrong on my wiki. All articles about persons use  in order to sort these articles by Family name, First name. The first letter of the keys is properly sorted, but the second letter and others are not always taken into account. It seems as if newer articles are sorted at the very end of a character listing. Here's an example category: https://en.intactiwiki.org/wiki/Category:Male. Any help is really appreciated. --Ulf Dunkel (talk) 16:37, 26 May 2021 (UTC)