MediaWiki

Chapter 6. Organizing Articles

As a MediaWiki site grows, it’s important to keep it organized. Otherwise, a previously helpful wiki starts to look like a confused book written by a hundred authors who have never met one another. Good writing, well-chosen article titles, and careful linking can help keep things in order, but MediaWiki also provides several powerful features specifically for organizing articles. In this chapter, we’ll cover:

Categories

Collecting articles into named groups

Namespaces

Partitioning the wiki into broad areas

Subpages

Creating a hierarchical article

Redirects

Creating synonyms or aliases for wiki articles

Disambiguation pages

Pages that distinguish articles with similar or identical names

Renaming

Changing the title of an article

Deleting

Removing an article

We’ll talk more about designing an effective wiki in Chapter 10, including planning for a good organization. Even after this planning, wikis may need to be rearranged (refactored) on a regular basis to serve their community most efficiently.

Tip

MediaWiki’s special pages (Chapter 8) are helpful for keeping the wiki organized. See Administration.

Categories

A category is a collection of articles that includes:

• A name

• Zero or more members of the category, including:

  • Articles

  • Other categories, called subcategories

• A category page, named Category:NameOfCategory, which lists the members and can be edited like an article

Authors can create categories, add and remove articles from categories, and even create parent-child relationships ...