Wikidot Community

I'm revealing here that I am in some ways totally Web/wiki ignorant, but I promise to do better! :) Anyway, I'm not really clear on the value of using categories. I understand them — group pages into a category, okay, I get it — but not their advantages, other than for some esoteric back-end organizational uses. Right now my wikis are all very flat and since they are small that isn't a problem, but I'm wondering whether it would be good to head off chaos at the pass by beginning to use categories now.

Can someone point me to a wiki (or two!) that is using categories in a, well, useful way?

On my Wiki, sonicjam.wikidot.com, I use categories to give each section a unique theme.

For example:

• All the pages in Japanese story section are part of the GHZ category and have a tropical background theme. (See http://sonicjam.wikidot.com/sisghz:index as an example).
• All the pages in the Western stories section are part of the MZ category and have an ancient ruins theme (See http://sonicjam.wikidot.com/sismz:index as an example).
• All the pages in the 1999 Interview section are part of the aii1999 category and have a desert theme (see http://sonicjam.wikidot.com/aii1999:index as an example).

Hence for my wiki, categories offer a convenient way to groups content together and give different sections of content a unique identity. This greatly helps with navigating the content.

My wiki, http://vidwik.org, is about cataloging music videos so my goal was to create a some what Media Player like UI experience.

The first place I used categories was to alter the side navigation bar I show when a user is on an artist page versus a help page.

The second place I use categories is to generally partion content and give myself the ability to later lock down who can edit certain type of content. All of my music genre and artist index pages go into "genre:" & "artist:" categories because I may latter want to say any members can add new artists but only administrators can modify the list of genres.

Another reason to categorize is because a lot of the various wikidot modules let you pass in a category to filter by. For instance, if you look at my main page you'll see lists of Top Rated and Recently Added artists. I can filter to only artists because all artists pages are in the _default category and I don't keep any other kind of content in that category. I chose to use the _default category for artists because I wanted pretty URLs for bands.

In fact, you may notice that "Home" is listed as the top Recently Added artist. That's because I still have my root welcome page in the _default category and there seems to be a bug that anytime you add another page it bumps "home" to the top of the Recently Added list. I need to move my "home" page to another category to fix the issue and ensure that only artists show up in the list.

-steve

Hmmm…. Im planning to have categories in my site (http://royalhandbook.wikidot.com)

Correct me if Im wrong..

Im planning to make categories so that to separate the monarchies of England to the rest… like listing them in like Nobles from England, Sweden, Spain, Saudi Arabia etc… then another categories of male nobilities, female nobilities, deceased nobilities, etc…

Is that possible with the categories thing?