Topics

Topics share some intent with IA's "collections" - ways to group together a lot of information by arbitrary terms. For instance, IA has a "Software" collection, which contains millions of items, but they also have things like:

• "Apple II Software Collection", which is specific to that machine
• "Apple II Games Collection", which is specific to games on that machine
• "Josh Wedgman's Apple II Software Collection", which is one person's collection of Apple II rips
• [WinWorldPC Collection March To August 2018], not actually a Collection, but a single item containing a single person's collection of rips as separate files

So "collection" is pretty vague on IA, but here we can do something a little more human-oriented.

On the homepage we have Topic:Computer History. That page is a Topic, which is, critically, maintained by people rather than auto-generated. The sections there, like "1980s" and "Early Videogames," are arbitrary divisions picked by people who think you might be interested in these specific perspectives.

Topics are more generalized than 'individual' pages, like Windows 3.x Shareware CD Reviews. Think of them as the most "Wiki-esque" pages on a wiki that's otherwise intended for unfiltered, often subjective material - but also central clearinghouses for people who aren't sure how to find what they're looking for. The Topic:Videogames list should be a great place for people to start finding interesting things when all they know is they want to see content about videogames.

Categories

MediaWiki supports "Categories," an automated way of grouping pages together. We use those too, but differently.

It is, of course, useful to be able to find every single page about "videogames" and search through them, so we have a Videogames category that can be attached to any single page; you would tag Klax with the Videogame category.

But if you want to see a list of videogame-related items sorted by meaningful categories (like "80s", "90s", "16bit", "never released", etc.) or links to videogame-related pages, maybe with some extra description of what these links are, a Topic is what you want.