Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Categorization (section)

===Wikipedia administrative categories ===
{{see|Wikipedia:Administration#Data structure and development|Wikipedia:Wikipedia namespace}}
{{see also|Category:Wikipedia administration}}
A distinction is made between two types of categories:
* Administrative categories{{snd}}intended for use by editors or by automated tools, based on features of the current state of articles, or used to categorize non-article pages.
* Content categories{{snd}}intended as part of the encyclopedia, to help readers find articles, based on features of the subjects of those articles.

Administrative categories include '''stub categories''' (generally produced by [[Wikipedia:Stub|stub]] templates), '''maintenance categories''' (often produced by [[Wikipedia:Template_index#Article-related_namespace|"cleanup" templates]] such as {{tl|cleanup}} and {{tl|fact}}, or those used for [[Wikipedia:Maintenance|maintenance]] projects), and '''categories of pages in non-article [[Wikipedia:Namespace|namespaces]]''', such as [[Wikipedia:WikiProject|WikiProject]] [[Wikipedia:Assessment|assessment]] [[:Category:Articles by quality|categories]] and [[:Category:Wikipedia policies and guidelines|categories]] holding [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Wikipedia policies and guidelines]].

Article pages should be kept out of administrative categories if possible. For example, the templates that generate WikiProject and assessment categories should be placed on talk pages, not on the articles themselves. If it is unavoidable that an administration category appears on article pages (usually because it is generated by a maintenance template that is placed on articles), then in most cases it should be made a '''hidden category''', as described in [[#Hiding categories|§&nbsp;Hiding categories]] below.

There are separate administrative categories for different kinds of non-article pages, such as [[Wikipedia:Project namespace|project page]] categories, [[Wikipedia:Template|template]] categories, [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation page categories|disambiguation page categories]], etc.

In ''maintenance categories'' and other ''administrative categories'', pages may be included regardless of type. For example, in an error tracking category it makes sense to group templates separately, because addressing the errors there may require different skills compared to fixing an ordinary article. For sorting each namespace separately, see [[#Sort keys|§&nbsp;Sort keys]] below.