Help:Categories

In Camerapedia, pages are indexed by Mediawiki categories. To know more about what Mediawiki categories are and how to use them, you can:

• try clicking on a few within this site (or Wikipedia, or another using similar software) and seeing what happens, or
• follow this external link to the corresponding help page of Wikimedia, or

combine a little of both.

Camerapedia has its own policies of categorization. Before adding preexisting categories to a page (let alone creating a new category), you can browse through the categories, all the way down from the Root category.

Categories for articles on cameras

Categories aren't only used for articles on cameras, but as the overwhelming majority of articles here are on cameras we'll look at these.

A page about a specific camera model should have the following categories:

• one or more categories for the type of camera
• a category for the country of origin
• one or two categories for the alphabetical index

The "country of origin" is normally that where the design was done: a camera planned in Japan and assembled in Malaysia is thus treated as Japanese.

Japan is a special case: the categories for the type of camera are prefaced by "Japanese". Thus although Leicaflex is in

• Category: 35mm SLR
• Category: Germany

(and others), Minolta SR-1 is in

• Category: Japanese 35mm SLR

(and others).

A page about a specific camera model may also be in the following categories:

• a category for the lens mount (if applicable and if such a category seems helpful)
• a category for the camera maker (if such a category seems helpful)

For example, the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 will likely have the following categories:

• Category:Japanese digital SLR
• Alpha (this addition of "|Alpha" lists the camera at the right place for "Alpha", not at that for "Sony Alpha")
• Category:Konica Minolta
• Category:Minolta AF mount
• Alpha Dslr-A100
• Category:S

and the Vitessa folder would have the following:

• Category: 35mm rangefinder folding
• Category: Barn door
• Category: Germany
• Category: Voigtländer
• Category: V

These articles could imaginably be put in various other categories; for example, the former could be in "SLR cameras". However, the general rule is not to put a page in the most specific category, and not to put it in this category and also one or more parents of this category. So the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 goes to "Category:Digital SLR" and is not listed under "Category:SLR". This general rule is sometimes broken; for example, cameras from the former East Germany are considered by most people as being German as well, so are listed in both.

Creating new categories

Please think very carefully before creating a new category. If you create one and you or others later decide that it is unsuitable, or is better renamed, a lot of work will have to be done.

(This is in part because categories can't be renamed. To achieve the more-or-less equivalent of renaming a category, an administrator has to delete it, and somebody creates a new category and edits all the references to it.)

If in any doubt, propose the new category in one or more relevant talk pages and wait to see what reaction there is to your proposal.

Markup

Adding [[Category:Nikon]] to a page adds that page to the Nikon category. This is what this page is talking about.

By contrast, adding [[:Category:Nikon]] — note the extra colon at the start — to a page does not add that page to the Nikon category but instead provides a regular inline link to the Nikon category. This is something that's seldom done other than (as within this page) discussing categories.

In the absence of a conclusion

There are still many points to be discussed about this scheme. Please think for yourself and post new ideas in the discussion page.

Further reading

• Category help (at Wikimedia)
• Categorization (at Wikipedia)
• Categorization FAQ (at Wikipedia)