Category:Orphaned categories
SpecialPage | Other versions |
---|---|
Short pages | User:Zorglbot/Shortpages |
DoubleRedirects | Double redirects |
Uncategorized | Category needed |
Uncategorized cats | Orphaned cats |
Long pages | Long pages |
Wanted pages | Most wanted |
Lonely pages | Orphaned articles |
Dead-end pages | Dead-end pages |
Dormant pages | n/a |
New pages | n/a |
Cross-namespace links | |
Broken redirects | |
See also Maintenance Reports, Collaboration |
This is a category for categories that need parenting. (For projects related to categorizing articles, see Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current). We recommend Articles that need manual categorization (by topic) if you just want to help categorize articles.)
Someone who has a good idea where these should go should edit them. It might be a good idea to try to follow any guides in Wikipedia:Categorization or Wikipedia:Category or Lists of articles by category.
You can encourage others to help out by adding the following to your edit summary:
- [[:Category:Orphaned categories|Help de-orphan categories]]
Contents |
High-level categories
Legitimately top-level categories should be added to Category:Fundamental so they will not show up on automated scans, and to make a canonical list for reference and editing.
Obsolete categories
Categories that were created by mistake or which have been or should be merged into a more appropriate category should usually be deleted after they are empty. To do this, edit the category and add the text {{cfd}} at the top of the file. Then make an entry on the page Wikipedia:Categories for deletion. Note that categories that are red do not need to be deleted. As long as they have zero subcategories and zero articles, they are effectively gone from the system.
Categories listed on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion will not be auto-detected as orphans while a decision is pending. They will be re-detected if a "keep" decision is rendered, so there's no need to double-list to-be-possibly-deleted categories on this page. (Hopefully not having to do that speeds up the de-orphaning process.)
Underpopulated categories
Categories that have been de-orphaned and need to be populated with existing articles rather than deleted can be added to Category:Underpopulated categories.
Geographical locations
You may wish to start hunting for parents for place-names at Category:Geography.
Tree of Life
Articles and categories regarding plants and animals belong in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life; those needing help should be listed in Category:Tree of Life cleanup.
Category redirects
Category redirects are currently somewhat broken. See status of bug on [1]
One workaround is to mark the category with {{categoryredirect|other category name}}.
See Category:Wikipedia category redirects.
- I have been able to do Category redirects without issue. Sct72 02:28, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
- Ok, except one - . I'm a guy, and therefore don't read instructions. HA! :) Sct72 05:15, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
Cleanup
Areas of category space that need general tidying can be noted on Category:Wikipedia categories in need of attention. This includes some categories with malformed titles and pages with malformed links which may be breaking the category hierarchy.
Automatically detected
User:Beland occasionally runs scripts on database dump to detect orphaned categories. (User:ssd and User:Anthony_DiPierro also have automated tools to generate candidates for this page.) Unresolved orphans are dumped below, sorted by date of detection, the number of subcategories and articles at the time of detection (this is the number in parentheses), and then alphabetically.
Categories at the top of the list (high numbers) are likely to be needed, popular with readers, and probably just need to be categorized appropriately. (But be sure to check that the orphaned category shouldn't be merged with an existing category instead.)
Categories at the bottom of the list (low numbers) are likely to be misspellings or redundant with an existing category. In this case, move the articles and subcategories to the right place, and nominate the category for deletion.
Blue links below have description-text (but no parents, unless recently fixed), and the red ones don't (but they do have member articles or subcategories).
Please delete orphans from this list when they are fixed. This will help avoid duplication of effort. Orphans listed on WP:CFD are automatically excluded from auto-detection, and will be re-detected if the decision is to keep them, so feel free to de-list them from this page.
Semi-automated suggestions
Some articles have suggestions from Pearle's deredundize.pl. The numbers next to the problem categories show the number of subcategories and articles at the time of detection.
The first number in the suggestion, if any, shows how many words the suggestion shares with the problem orphan (this is the one followed by the colon). The second number shows how many total subcategories + articles there are in the suggested category.
Many of the suggestions are incorrect, but they are usually better than starting from Category:Fundamental every time. Thank you to all the humans who make the final decisions to add, merge, or find a better home.
Need to be given parent categories and/or populated as of September 17, 2005
Need to be populated and given parent categories
Done
Need to be populated - see also Underpopulated categories
- Category:Modern American anti-tank missiles
- Category:Prejudice and discrimination
- Category:Social institutions
Updated from Special:Uncategorizedcategories on 15 Oct 2005
- Category:Categories - ??
Blank category pages as of Dec 13, 2005
Done