Help:Categorization

Here is an attempt in codifying the Coppermind's categorization structure.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty details, categories are listed at the bottom of a page. Every article, template, and file should be categorized. It is important to categorize everything correctly, as categories are one of two ways that an article can be found (the other way, of course, is through wiki-links). Articles should be able to be found from the main series categories (as listed on the main page), or through the main content categories on the sidebar on the left. To categorize something, go to the page you want to categories and insert Category: Whatever with [[ ]] around it. However, many infoboxes and navigation boxes will often categorize content appropriately.

Every article should be a member of at least three categories:

• It must be in one of the main series categories (Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, etc). These categories will always be inserted for you by the series navigation box (those are the big boxes at the bottom of each article that have particularly noteworthy articles). For example, to insert the Stormlight Archive navbox, use {{Stormlight}}. And when you insert that, not only does that give the navbox into your article, but the category is taken care of too. Nice.
• It must be in one of the main content categories, like Character, Places, Magic, Flora and Fauna. A complete list of these will be below. Usually this category will also be automatically inserted by a template, like {{Character}}, which is the infobox for characters.
• It must be in one of the four "quality" categories: Stub, Complete, Good, Exemplary. Also, if the article is about an especially important subject, it should go in the Notable category.

That's at minimum. As you can see, with the correct templates, categorization gets a lot easier. But feel free to categorize away. The Coppermind's categories are like tags, not folders. In a folder system (like your computer's file system), a file is a member of exactly one folder. Wiki articles are not like that. Articles can be in a lot of categories. The more categories, the better. Maybe the list of all Viewpoint Characters will be useful to someone at some point. Who knows. The more the merrier. (Oh, and a random note: talk pages should never be categorized)

Now, into the nitty gritty specifics, for those who care. If you're a novice editor, you probably don't. Hell, Windy doesn't care, so this is only for the hardest-core people who actually want to know if there is some hierarchy to categories. There is, unfortunately. It's complicated.

There is a hidden Category called Root, which is essentially the "highest" level of category. It is merely a placeholder for the three types of pages that we have on the wiki: Content, Administration, and Silly. Each of these three have slightly different categorization policies. We will focus most on Content, as that's the most important. Administration contains administrative categories like ones that sort templates, and classifications of articles (like the quality categories). Silly is for noncanonical, joke content.

Content

The Content category should not be directly applied to pages; it is just a category that holds all content. The rationale behind this is that content pages make up about 95% of the wiki, and are pretty obvious when you are looking at it. A list of content related things is not particularly useful (and besides, that sort of thing can be found using AllPages).

As the Coppermind deals with many different series, it is critical that every article related to a particular book or series is in its respective category, called series identifiers. These categories--Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, The Emperor's Soul, Alcatraz, and Rithmatist--are always inserted from a series' navbox.

Content is split up into fourteen high level categories: Books, Characters, Cosmere, Culture, Ethniticities and Nationalities, Events and Eras, Flora and Fauna, Groups, Items, Magic, Out of Universe, Magic, Places, Sources. Every content article should be in one of these categories.

You might wonder, well, there's a category for Stormlight Archive and one for Characters, but what if I want to find all characters in Stormlight Archive? Unfortunately, the wiki software can't search two categories at once easily. But never fear, we have you covered! The Characters, Culture, Events and Eras, Flora and Fauna, Groups, Items, Magic, and Places categories will all have subcategories (that each article will also be in) corresponding to each series. For example, Stormlight Archive happens on Roshar, so search Category:Roshar for all places on Roshar. Or Rosharan for every Rosharan character, and so on. Usually, this subcategory will be inserted automatically from the infobox at the top of the article.

(Why don't the other high level content categories get series subcategories? Well, Books are obviously important enough to be on every series' navbox. Cosmere topics are related to the connected stuff between series, so those make little sense to belong to an individual series usually. Ethnicities and Nationalities is mostly a category which holds categories of people's ethnicities, so isn't important enough for that. Out of Universe stuff is not related to any series.)

Administration

Article Quality Statuses

There are four different statuses an article can have: Stub, Complete, Good, or Exemplary.

Stubs are for short, terrible articles that need expanding. Stubs are bad. These can either graduate to Complete status--which indicates that though the article is short, it has all the possible knowledge on the subject--or Good status.

Good articles are articles which are too long to be considered mere stubs, but could still be improved. These are usually on meaty subjects like main characters, where the info in the article is obviously longer than a stub, but doesn't contain everything that could be said about the character. Good articles can eventually graduate to Exemplary status.

Exemplary articles are the best articles on the Coppermind. They contain a wealth of information, and are conceivably totally complete with their treatment at hand.

Notable articles are slightly outside of this hierarchy. They are simply a tag which indicates the importance of an article, instead of its actual quality. These should theoretically be promoted to Exemplary status eventually.