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Helping readers find things

Updated 2026-08-13

The sidebar holds a handful of doors. A wiki with two hundred pages needs more, and the rest is three things you mostly get for free.

Search

A page has one address but any number of categories, which is the thing a folder hierarchy cannot express.

Search is on by default and covers your pages. It is how most readers reach most pages.

What decides whether it works is not a setting. It is whether your pages say the words people search for.

A page titled “The Winchester” that never uses the word rifle is a page nobody searching for a rifle will find. Put the obvious synonyms in the first paragraph, where they read naturally.

You can also put the search box in the sidebar as an item of its own. See Navigation and the home page.

Categories

A category is a label you put on a page. Pages sharing one are listed together, so a reader on one weapon can reach every other weapon without going back to a menu.

  1. Open a page.
  2. Use its categories control to add one, or pick an existing one.
  3. Repeat on the pages that belong together.
An addressOne per page. A shotgun lives at weapons/shotgun.See Organise your pages.
CategoriesAs many as you like. That shotgun can be in both Weapons and Starter gear.Exactly what a hierarchy cannot express.

Keep them few and obvious. Twenty categories with three pages each help nobody; six with thirty each are a map of the wiki.

Recent changes

Every wiki has a recent-changes feed at /recent: what was edited, by whom, and when, with a way into each change. It does two jobs at once.

For you: the patrol listThe fastest way to see what contributors have done, especially on a wiki that does not hold edits for review.
For readers: proof it is aliveWhich is most of what makes somebody come back to a wiki.

That is why linking it from the home page is worth doing. A front page showing the last few edits says people are working on this more convincingly than any sentence you could write.

The one habit that beats all three

Link from inside your pages. A reader who just finished reading about a weapon is the best possible audience for the enemy it is good against.

A link in that sentence outperforms search, categories and the sidebar, because it arrives at the moment the question does. The editor names the page a link points at while you write it, so a link to something you later renamed is visible to you rather than to a reader.