About Categories

There are a number of categories that are currently used in KayakWiki. To see a complete list of categories, see Categories. If you look at the bottom of this page, you will see that it belongs to the KayakWiki Housekeeping category.

Categories are optional. They provide an alternative way of indexing information in KayakWiki. Categories on KayakWiki should be general. The idea is to group information in the most general way. The hierarchy of the page links creates very specific way of getting to information and narrowly defines a page as a result. By using categories, we can allow any reader of KayakWiki to find related information simply by looking at a categories contents.

For example, the category Design and Theory includes pages that generally relate to any topic in the design of kayaks and the theoretical underpinnings of marine architecture. For that reason, all kayak terms such as bow, gunwale or coaming will be included with terms like stations or buttock lines, as they are related as design information. Similarly, all info on hydrodynamics or hydrostatics is in the same category.

When a page is added to a category, it will show up on a listing of all pages in that category. For example, if a page belongs to Tools, clicking on that category at the bottom of the page will bring up a page with an alphabetic listing of all Tools pages.

Clicking on Category in front of the category name below will open a page of all the categories. Familiarize yourself with them - you can use them when adding a page or when you are looking for a page.

A page is added to a category by including the following at the bottom of the page:

[[Category:category name]]

Where category name follows the same naming rules as any other page.

A page can belong to more than one category; simply add a category statement to the bottom of the page for each category to which the page belongs. For example:

[[Category:category name]]
[[Category:second category name]]