Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 3 (section)

==Categories in 'Watchlist', 'recent changes' edit summaries==

I've noticed that when I add people to a category and put the category within its square brackets for the edit summary (ie I just copy and paste my edit into the summary), it appears as ''category:person's name'' rather than ''category:category they've just been put in'' on my Watchlist.  For a while I thought "oh, well, I bet it looks all right to everyone else, it's probably just cos ''I've'' done it".

But I'm asking cos I'm bored.  Well, no, it's a bit more important than that, cos I've set up 2 categories that could be considered controversial so, as such, I want them signposted so people can fight against them - they're ''alcoholics'' and ''gay icons'', since I knew you'd ask. --[[User:Bodnotbod|bodnotbod]] 06:37, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)

:Well, I was looking at [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&limit=50&offset=100&hideminor=0&target=Bodnotbod your contributions page] and at first couldn't see any examples - but then I spotted some, and realised what was going on: because the category system uses the same syntax to say "sort under this name" as a normal link uses for "display as this name", the edit summary is displaying it as a piped link. In other words, you typed <nowiki>[[Category:Gay icons|Jackson, Janet]]</nowiki>, so it made a link labelled "Jackson, Janet", just like it would for any other piped link. 

:I suppose their could be a special case in the software for spotting this, but the easy way round for now is just to not put the piping in your edit summaries - e.g. <nowiki>[[Category:Gay icons]]</nowiki> should work fine. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] 12:23, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)