Category School: Lesson One - Personal Categories

Question

I'm beginning a series of posts (maybe weekly) to inform on the use of our category hierarchy. Today's topic is Personal Categories, which are a great tool to use in your WikiTree activities.

Let's say you are researching profiles for a project or just for your own family research and you want to have a way to keep this organized. You can use personal categories to do it. Just decide what will work for your purposes, then create some categories.

Your top level personal category is [[Category:YourWikiID]], so mine is [[Category:Durbin-702]]. Go to your own profile page and add the category if you didn't already create one. The category will be red, but click that red link and enter the parent category into the category edit box.The parent category you should add is [[Category:Personal Categories]]. Then scroll down and save it. Now you have your personal category. Next you need to add subcategories, where you will add profiles and/or other subcategories.

The subcategories MUST start with your WikiTree ID in order to be your personal subcategories. One of mine is [[Category:Durbin-702 Needs Biography]]. If I just used [[Category:Needs Biography]] and gave it a parent of [[Category:Durbin-702]] then it would be for WikiTree-wide use, which is not what I want. I want to have a place for profiles I manage or otherwise care about, so that I know that "these profiles need a biography written."

I can use any names I like for sub-category names, but, as noted in Help:Category Names, "The only allowed characters are Letters in any alphabet, numbers, space, comma, dot, hyphen (only the normal one but not wide, ...), single quotation mark (as apostrophe but do not use apostrophe) and parentheses (in pair). There is also a colon in the name but must be used only following "Category:""

The subcategories should have a parent of [[Category:YourWikiID]]. The only profile that should have a parent category of [[Category:YourWikiID]] is your own! And only WikiTree members can have personal categories; other profiles may not. 

If you find that you no longer need some of the personal subcategories, feel free to delete them. If you don't know how to do that, we can  help with that:here.

Here is a screenshot of my personal category page:

More information is here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Personal_Categories

If you have questions, just ask below!

:-) 

Comments

Great post, Natalie! Thank you for this. I'll be looking forward to seeing the others ones in the series.

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I think I should do "red" categories. And thanks, Chris.

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Great post! Thank you! Cari

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Nice, and very good idea to have tutorials like this.

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Thanks so much, Natalie! Very well written!

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Thanks, Nelda!

Answer 1

Yes!!!! I was looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing!

Answer 2

Natalie,

I have been using personal categories for a long time and find that keeping them simple is best.  So now I only use one - it may have up to 25 or 30 profiles at a time but that is not a problem.

I also learned a trick if I need to add parents or something else in a profile I can enter [[Category:Smith-40964| add parents]]  It is a trick because on the profile page only Category:Smith-40964 shows, but when I look at it, or anyone else does, they will see that I am planning to add parents.  I can put a long line after the "|". (pipe) and it does not bother anyone.  I find that if I do not leave a note I my forget what it was that I wanted to do or had found and know that I can add.

Comments

I've never tried using the pipe! I'll have to do so.

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The only thing to note is that adding the pipe won't add any subcategory... I just looked with mine

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Thanks Richard!

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What's after the pipe is the sort key.  When you look at the category members list, the profile won't appear in its natural place, it'll be positioned as if its name was " add parents" or whatever.  (Spaces are included and sort to the top)

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On second thoughts, I think sort keys only work with subcategories.  Sort keys are ignored with ordinary profiles (except in Unsourced Profiles) because they have to be resorted by surname and given name instead of pagename.

Answer 3

Natalie!

This is so very helpful!  Thank you very much for the personal category tutorial.  I'm going to go give it a whirl.

All the best,

Janet

Comments

Happy to help! If you get stuck, give me a holler.

Answer 4

I tried adding a personal category for myself, but I don't see my name on the Personal Category list, and the link still remains red. Have I done something incorrectly?

Comments

No, you just haven't completed the set up! I'll take a look.

It's good to go now. Your main personal category needed the parent of [[Category:Personal Categories]].

Any subsequent subcategories would be [[Category:Stronach-8 Whatever You Need]] with a parent category of [[Category:Stronach-8]].