Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1432718-20130308023949/@comment-188432-20130308054909

Individual humans was intentionally removed, knowing that it might add some pages to Special:UncategorizedPages. The hope was that people would then try to give these pages better, more specific categories.

There is not a one-size-fits-all approach here. You just have to read the pages and try to figure out a better category.

Our category system does make sense, but as with any wiki, including Wikipedia, you do have to get used to its nomenclature. A tip would be to add categories only from the category box as it naturally appears on the page. Don't open up an edit window and then try to type in a category there.

The reason is that the link suggest in the category module is much more flexible than the link suggest in the edit window. In the edit window, you have to type in the category name in the correct order. In the category module, you can type the words out of order.

The practical effect of this is easy to demonstrate. Imaging that you're trying to find a category that has the word time in it. If you put time into the category module, you'll get things like category:Closing Time TV story images, category:Time Lords, Category:The End of Time TV story images and the like. Within the regular edit window, if you want category:Closing Time TV story images, you have to know that the category begin with the word closing and type all the words in that order.

This distinction can be very helpful when you're trying to orient yourself to our system.

Another thing you can do to figure us out is to go to category:floor 500, and then just spend some time "drilling down" through our categories. If you begin to pick up some of the big parent category, you have a place to start looking if a category name proves elusive. In this case, the category you'd start with is category:individuals, and then look at the various subcats.

Additionally, it's very easy to create charts of categories by using the Category Tree extension. It's a flexible extension, so there are all sorts of different output. Here's just one example

gives us something that looks like this: