Tardis:User categories

If you stay here and edit with us for a while, you'll probably gather up a number of user subpages — like User:SmallerOnTheOutside/1 May (production) or user:CzechOut/API or User:Shambala108/Sandbox. But after a while, you may find that you've created enough subpages to warrant a category. You're not actually obliged to create user categories, but if you do, know that user categories must conform to the following standards.

User category rules
You can do pretty much what you want with your user categories. But all user categories must:
 * be placed in, and only in, category:users.
 * be named in the format , as with Category:User SmallerOnTheOutside
 * contain no sort keys

Why so strict?
If you come from Wikipedia — or even some Wikia wikis — you might find these rules absurdly strict. But there are a number of reasons why it's a good idea to have clear guidelines on user categories.

The main reason is that at Tardis, some users will have exactly the same name as a character, location or vehicle in the DWU.

Take the case of user:Tenth Doctor. If we didn't insist upon a strict naming convention for user categories, then what might category:Tenth Doctor mean? Is it a category about the character of the Tenth Doctor or the work of user:Tenth Doctor?

By requiring the word "User" to precede the user name, we're therefore accomplishing two things: consistency in identifying categories about users and we're making sure that all user categories will alphabetise by the user's name. After all, if all categories are preceded by the word "User", alphabetisation is based on what comes after. This means that sort keys are not needed to achieve perfectly usable alphabetisation.

By mandating that all user categories be placed in one and only one place, we're making it easy to find user pages — something that's vital to collaboration. And we're also making sure that they get auto-alphebetised in the same part of the category tree. Category:Users becomes your "one stop shop" for finding user pages.

In sum, our three simple rules help to build an orderly archive of rough drafts and works-in-progress — something that's absolutely vital to collaboration, a key precept of this project.