Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Discussing Categories

Here’s a puzzle that new editors often encounter: How do you mention a category on a discussion page? If you type [[Category:WhatevertheCategoryis]], you’ve just put the discussion page into that category, and the category name itself won’t show up where you typed it. It’ll show up at the bottom of the page, which isn’t very helpful. Wikipedia has two different ways to display the category link where you want it: Add a colon just before the word Category, or use the {{cl}} template, as shown in Figure 17-9.

Figure 17-9. Want to mention a category within a comment you’re making on a discussion page? If so, either add a colon just before the word Category, or use the {{cl}} template. Both choices display the category name where you typed it, within your comment, and neither will put the discussion page they’re on into a category.

If you’re looking at a category page for articles, and find talk or user or other pages listed there as well, it’s worth taking a quick look at these other pages to see if you can fix the problem with a judicious insertion of a colon. Sometimes you shouldn’t (for example, a draft article in user space probably isn’t hurting anything if it’s being worked on and already has a category), and sometimes you can’t easily insert a colon (if the category is embedded in a template, for example). But often the mislisted page is just a simple mistake ...