Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/How-to

Twinkle
You may use Twinkle to facilitate CfD nominations. To install Twinkle, go to Special:Preferences and check "Twinkle" in the "Browsing" section. Use the now-installed "XfD" (Start a deletion discussion) tab while viewing the page you want to nominate.

Twinkle only allows you to nominate a single category or stub template. For bundled nominations including multiple categories, see.

MassCFD
You can use the script User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/massCFD to automatically make mass nominations.

Notifying interested projects and editors
In addition to the steps listed above, you may choose to invite participation by editors who are likely to be informed about a nominated category. All such efforts must comply with Wikipedia's guideline against biased canvassing. In addition, to help make your messages about the CfD discussion clear, avoid Wikipedia-specific abbreviations, link to relevant policies or guidelines, and link to the discussion itself.

WikiProjects consist of groups of editors who are interested in a particular subject. If a nominated category is within the scope of one or more WikiProjects, consider adding a brief, neutral note on their talk page(s) about the nomination. You may use  or write a personalized message.
 * Notifying related WikiProjects

Tagging the nominated category's talk page with a relevant WikiProject's banner will include the category in that WikiProject's Article Alerts if they subscribe to the system. For instance, tagging a nominated category with WikiProject Physics will add the discussion to WikiProject Physics/Article alerts.

While not required, it is generally considered courteous to notify the good-faith creator and main contributors of the category that you are nominating for discussion. To find the creator and main contributors, check the category's page history or talk page. You may use to inform the category's creator and all other editors.
 * Notifying substantial contributors to the category

It may be helpful to invite other subject-matter experts by posting a message on the talk page of the most closely related article, such as Protein family for Category:Protein families. You may use for this.
 * Notifying other interested editors

Closing procedure
After seven days, someone will close the discussion according to the consensus that formed or, if needed, relist it to allow more discussion. Editors closing discussions must follow the administrator instructions and, except in the case of a "keep" or "no consensus" outcome, implement the result or log it at the Working page to ensure it is implemented.

Redirecting categories
In general, an unpopulated category should be deleted (see speedy deletion criterion C1) because it is not useful for navigation and sorting. In limited circumstances, and because categories cannot be redirected using "hard" redirects (i.e. ), we use a form of "soft redirect" to solve the issue. You can create a category redirect by adding to the category page. Bots patrol these categories and move articles into the "redirect" targets.

In particular, category redirects are used at the former category name when we convert hyphens into en dashes (e.g. Category:Canada-Russia relations → Category:Canada–Russia relations). It is also helpful to set up category redirects from titles with plain letters (i.e. characters on a standard keyboard) where the category names include diacritics.

A list of redirected categories is available at Category:Wikipedia soft redirected categories.