Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Working with categories
 | This page is part of the Military history WikiProject's online Academy, and contains instructions, recommendations, or suggestions for editors working on military history articles. While it is not one of the project's formal guidelines, editors are encouraged to consider the advice presented here in the course of their editing work. |
All articles should be placed in at least one category. Categories are used to index articles which share a common theme. For example, Category:Presidents of the United States details all 45 US Presidents from George Washington to Donald Trump, under A–Z headings, preceded by a list of related sub-categories, such as Category:Assassinated Presidents of the United States, and Category:Presidents of the United States by party, which in itself contains further sub-categories for various political parties, such as Whigs, Republicans and Democrats, which in turn detail the articles ordered alphabetically.
Creating and sorting categories requires careful planning. Editors should be careful not to create articles which already exist under a similar name, and should perform a careful and thorough search before proceeding, as duplicate categories may be merged or deleted. It is also important to avoid over categorising an article. Another common mistake is to place an article into both a parent and child category. For instance, Category:South West Pacific theatre of World War II is a parent category, while Category:Operation Cartwheel is a child, or subcategory of it. An article should not be placed in both, and should be placed in the lowest categorisation structure (in this case Operation Cartwheel).
The military history manual of style contains details regarding existing project categories, how to name military history categories, and categories to avoid due to complications involving point of view considerations.
Experienced editors with access to use AutoWikiBrowser will be able to categorise articles quickly using the functions it offers. The HotCat script also assists with quickly adding or removing categories.