This page contains ideas and principles for creating and linking categories. Ideas for changing it are best added to the discussion page until we have a reasonable consensus among active contributors, because changing category linkages can have wide repercussions that may reduce the wiki's usefulness in unforeseen ways.

At the time of writing (2005-07-18T21:33:17), our top-level category had the following "child" (ie 2nd-level) subcategories:

• Category:Given Names - listings and meanings and other information

• Category:Help (which has its own whole separate namespace starting at Help:Contents)

• Category:Lists of People by Surname - currently contains 31 categories, starting with "Adams Surname", but there will be thousands more, and we will organise systems for easy access by initial letter

• Category:Lists of Unlinked Individuals - people who have no relatives elsewhere in the wiki at present; groupings can be geographical to help with possible matching

• Category:Surnames - a couple of subcategories and a few articles, not yet differentiated; we may use this differently in future; most lists or categories should be in one of the two listed above

• Category:Templates - (not in the technical sense: just useful models for simplifying the process of creating and linking pages)

Subsequent developmentsEdit

• Category:Genealogy has been brought in as the prime subcat, containing any cat that is included under that subject.

• Category:Lists of People by Surname - people were using it and "Surnames" equally or randomly, so we chopped this one. No apparent distinction had been made out.

• Category:Templates - now includes true MediaWiki templates, mostly in the Category:Wikia templates subcat. Could do with some sorting and subcat creation.

• Category:Organization was given more of the non-content material, following the current Wikia standard.

In 2009, Familypedia started using Semantic MediaWiki, which will somewhat reduce the need for fine categorization, at least for people. See Familypedia:Concepts.