As some of you may have noticed, I have been spending a lot of time in the past few days working on categorization. I've been making many new categories and deleting old/repetitive ones, since historically categories have always been a problem for this wiki, which I will get into more in a bit. I'm going to keep this somewhat short because I plan on writing a help page explaining categorization and how to do it.
What changes am I making? And why?[]
Basically, I am trying to make sure that there are no categories that have too few or too many pages. An example of a category that only has a few articles would be Category:Nitroade (which I have deleted) since there aren't very many articles that fit under the theme, which is pages that have to do with the Nitroade product. On the other end, categories like Category:Characters have over 1,000 pages in them, which is over a fourth of all the pages on this wiki. That is way too broad of a category, which defeats the purpose of categories in the first place.
The Characters category is still going to exist, but I'm going to move every article in that category into an appropriate subcategory. For example, all the characters that appear in Cars will be put into "Cars Characters", all Cars: The Video Game characters will be put into Cars: The Video Game Characeters, and so on.
The other thing is currently, many character pages suffer from having categories that apply to the exact same thing, when one should really be a subcategory of the other. For example, many Cars 3 characters are in "Cars 3" and "Cars 3 Characters" which is extremely repetitive. It makes much more sense to have "Cars 3 Characters" be a subcategory of "Cars 3".
So, for installments with multiple characters, I'm moving them all into "[name of installment] Characters" categories, which those category pages themselves will be placed into the "[name of installment]" categories. It's also worth noting that for installments with few characters in each, for example, the Cars Toons shorts, rather than making an individual category, we might as well just add them into the main category (example given, putting Lightning McQueen into Rescue Squad Mater and NOT Rescue Squad Mater Characters"). I'm aware there might be some subjectivity over what a big or small amount of characters is, but I think as a general rule, all of the Cars Toons shorts can just have the main category, while the films and video games will need "[name] character" categories.
Some misc. notes[]
- The "Cars Toons" category is also overly big, so I'm moving all of the characters and locations into categories for each short. Rescue Squad Mater, Mater the Greater, El Materdor, etc. instead of Cars Toons.
- This seems like it will take a long time but I don't think it will, especially if other people are willing to help me. Editing categories is a piece of cake so I think it'll be fine. Many people like to add categories just for getting badges so all I will say about that is please be careful if you're planning on helping out.
As I said before, I'll write a more in-depth guide that will cover not only everything I mentioned here in greater detail, but also more information about how I plan to categorize things like images, templates, and other things that aren't quite part of the mainspace.