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Categories and articles serve different purposes in Wikipedia. Where articles are meant to be the main direct source of informative content that readers spend the majority of their time reading, categories are meant to be a navigational system that helps readers quickly move from one related article to another within a related subject area. Articles are meant to support detailed discussions on a particular topic, while categories are ideally streamlined indexes that can point readers to the discussions they want.

This page contains guidance on the proper use of the categorization function in Wikipedia. The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to pages in Wikipedia within a hierarchy of categories. Using essential, defining characteristics of a topic, readers can browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics.