For general matters on categories, see category help.

Wikipedia includes a number of lists, but it is difficult to keep these lists complete and up-to-date, and to maintain connections between elements of a list and articles about those elements. Additionally, scaling aspects of the encyclopedia such as browsing, watchlists, and Recent Changes can be improved by identifying the articles with categories.

A category system has been developed for the MediaWiki software that could automatically generate some of these lists and provide such categorization. The flat list of all categories can be found at Special:Categories, although Category:Fundamental may be more suited for browsing.

Alternative systems include Wikipedia:Article series, Wikipedia:Incumbent series, and Wikipedia:Topics. See Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and series boxes.

For a discussion of how to use categories and which categories should exist, see Wikipedia:Categorization.

See also

• Wikipedia:Browse - A navigation page that includes links to high-level categories
• Special:Categories - an alphabetical list of all categories with subcategories or categorized articles
• m:Help:Category
• m:Categorization.
• Wikipedia:List, can have more structure and more information within a single page than a category; see also Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_1#Lists_v._categories and Category:Lists that should be categories
• Wikipedia:Navigational templates, often a small list for use in several related articles, without the usual disadvantages of duplication; e.g. a county article as well as articles on towns in that county can have the same list of towns; unlike a category, it can also show towns for which there is not yet an article, with a link to conveniently create one; groups of articles can thus be created top-down.
• Wikipedia:What links here - if e.g. a county article does not list the towns in it, this link can help find existing town articles because they are likely to have a link to the county article.