Can someone change the name of a category?

+9 votes
120 views

The category for the Battle of Gaines' Mill is listed incorrectly as Category: Battle of Gaine's Mill.  This has caused broken category links for profiles that have the battle name spelled correctly.

Note:  Thought Wikipedia spells it as Gaines's Mill, I used the spelling as listed by the Civil War Trust, and the National Park Service, history.net, and the Library of Congress.

in Policy and Style by Star Kline G2G6 Pilot (545k points)

There are wiki tools for renaming wiki categories but I havn't seen them on Wikitree.....

Some people inside WIkitree think we shouldn't have tools like that as it's a good exercise changing a category and review what is on the profile

- not me I feel it's more like a Sisyphus work;-)  maybe that the contribution counter increase could make some people happy...

 

1 Answer

+6 votes
 
Best answer
Star,

It is not possible to change category names.  So the only method is to create a new category.

The old category will still exist so you need to add a template in showing the correct name.

This is the template

{{Misnamed Category|correct category name}}

So just go ahead and do it over - create a new category as needed and when you have it add the template to the old one and you are done.

There is lots more information in the Categorization Project.
by Philip Smith G2G6 Pilot (287k points)
selected by Keith Hathaway
What appends to the profiles listed in the old category ? Are they automaticaly listed in the new one ?
Guy,

The still sit in the old category which will sit in the misnamed category section - that is why the proper practice is to move all profiles to the new category name if an old category name is changed.  Details are shown on the categorization pages.

Of course as people have to do the work, it may very well not get done.

As we have no bot doing the work it's better to use Templates to create a category if you think the names can change.

If you use a Template the change is done at one place... e.g. my change last week of Template: Czech_Roots just deleting one line then we moved +6000 profiles away from Category:Czech_Roots_Project...

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