Help:Categories

What are Categories?

Categories enable users to navigate around the Stamps of the World site, by slotting pages into sections which can be searched and viewed. All pages should be assigned to at least one category, and for nearly all sets, this will include the country of issue, and the year.

For example, a Spanish set of Christmas stamps from 1978 would routinely be added to the categories “Spain” and “1978”. It is also helpful to add it to further categories such as “Christmas”, and if it contains famous paintings, a category called “Paintings”, etc.

Adding stamp sets to Categories

If you are adding a new set, it will need to be placed in the relevant category(s). Before you proceed, you may want to check whether the category already exists (it may not have an identical name to the one you are envisioning - for example if you want to add it to “Christmas”, it might be that there is already a category “Xmas”, which could be used).

To add a page to a category it is as easy as typing the following on the page, and you're done:

[[Category:CategoryName]]

Note the format - double square brackets at either end, and a colon after the word “Category”.

When you now view the page of stamps, the category will be showing at the bottom, and will link through to the rest of that category if you click on it.

Creating new Categories

New categories will usually be sub-sections of larger ones. For example, "Hockey" will be part of the larger category of "Thematics". So if you create a new category, it needs to be added to a higher category (sometimes more than once, until we reach the top level).

If you want to create a "Hockey" category for a page of stamps, follow the same procedure as above, with Hockey as the category name. When you now look at the page of stamps, the new category “Hockey” will be visible at the bottom, but in red, and will not link to a larger list.

What you need to do is place “Hockey” inside the higher category, “Thematics”. You do this by clicking on “Hockey”, and this will take you into the edit screen. There, you should type:

[[Category:Thematics]]

What you have done is create “Hockey” then make it a section of “Thematics”. This makes the page structure as follows:

• Thematics
  • Hockey
    • The page of stamps

The page of stamps is part of "Hockey", which in turn is part of "Thematics". Website users can now look and find it in the relevant listings.

Creating empty categories

The procedure above will only be useful if you have a page of stamps to work with in the first place. However there may be occasion when you wish to create a category which currently has no applicable pages at all, but which can be added to in due course. (We’ll use “Stars” as an example.)

To do this, follow this procedure:

In the search box on the left-hand menu of the website, type:

Category:Stars

Click on the search button and you will see a screen advising you that there is no such page, and asking you if you’d like to create one. If you proceed to do so, you will find yourself on the edit screen for the new category, Stars. On that screen, assign it to an existing higher category, eg “Astronomy”, and you have established “Stars” as a sub-category of the “Astronomy” category. It can then be used as needed, when appropriate sets of stamps are uploaded.

Linking to a category

When linking any text on Stamps of the World the markup is [[Pagename|Link text|]] but with categories if you need to add an additional semi-colon before the word category to prevent the current page from becoming part of that category.

[[:Category:Thematics]]