Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Category Links in Articles

Wikipedia has plenty of category pages, like the one shown in Figure 17-1. These pages become more useful when editors keep adding relevant articles to them. You do that not by editing a category page, but by editing the articles themselves.

Adding Categories to Articles

You can add a category link to the bottom of an article in two ways: by typing the category link into the article’s wikitext (in the edit box), or by adding a template to the wikitext. You do the first for the topical categories that interest readers, such as Category:Australian astronomers. The second way (with a template) is usually for marking an article as needing cleanup (improvement) work, for example, Category:Articles lacking sources from September 2007.

The basic category link

Adding a topical category to an article is easy. To add the category Toddler sports to an article, for example, open that article for editing, and type, near the bottom (more on that in a moment), the text [[Category:Toddler sports]]. Then do the standard stuff: Add an edit summary, preview your edit, and save the change. The text you typed is exactly how the link appears at the bottom of the article.

There’s one twist, however: When you preview, you won’t see the new category above the edit toolbar, where the rest of the article is displayed. Nor will you see any existing categories for the article above the toolbar. Rather, you have to scroll down, past the edit box, past the insertable wikicode, and ...