Tagging articles: simple and powerful!

World Anvil is packed with features that may not seem much at first but that are actually very useful! One of these features is the tagging system, which will help you organise your articles. Let’s unpack this feature and see how you can use it!

The information on this blog post might be outdated! Check the documentation for the most up-to-date information about this feature.

How tagging works

You can add several tags to any article, as well as other elements such as images, maps, and more —but let’s focus on articles. To add a tag, edit the article and look for the Tags field in the Navigation tab:

Use a comma to separate tags. Pretty simple, huh?

You might be thinking that it’s not that useful, since categories seem to have a similar functionality. But don’t leave yet —we’re just getting started!

Alternative categorisation

An article can only be inside a single category, but sometimes you need a more complex organization. If you have ever wished for an article to be categorized under multiple categories, you will love tags! Tags are not limited to one per article, so feel free to add as many as you want.

For example, you can tag all nobles from different countries as “nobility”. This will make them easily searchable even if they are in separate categories. Similarly, you can tag all your articles that were presented in a worldbuilding challenge to track your progress!

Retrieving a list of all tagged articles

Tags would be of little use if you weren’t able to see all articles with a specific tag, but you can do that in two different ways! The quickest way to get all tagged articles is typing it in the search field. For example, typing #nobility will give you a list of all nobles in your world (provided you tagged them, of course).

However, the most powerful way is using the [tagged] BBCode, which lets you generate automatic lists of tagged articles. The Codex has a guide to the tagging system where you can learn the ins and outs of this system.

Tagging player secrets

If you are using World Anvil to manage your campaign, you can tag all articles concerning one of your players. Then, use [tagged] to generate an automatic list of the player’s articles. It’s almost like an automatic profile for your characters!

In this screenshot, Oneriwien, author of Ravare, has generated lists of articles about one of his characters:

This specific article is private (secrets!) but you should check out Ravare anyway!

Tagging related articles

Frog God Games is using this feature to display related articles.

Another way of using tagged articles is to display quick links to locations related to an adventure. For example, if you have an adventure called “The Goblin Cave”, you can tag all related articles as #goblin-cave. Then, use [tagged] to generate a list of these articles in your adventure plot article! As with the rest of examples, this system works well because the list will update itself as you tag new articles.

Tagging spell books and catalogs

If you are writing fantasy, you can use the Spell article template to write about individual spells. Tag them all as spells (or use different spells for different magic schools) and use [tagged] to generate a spell book! For example, you could then create another article titled Water magic and generate a list of articles tagged with #water-spell.

A similar idea would be a catalog of spaceships if you write sci-fi. Simply tag all spaceships with a different tag depending on the kind of spaceship they are. Then, you can create a Spaceship catalog article and use several of these lists for each type of spaceship.

Graylion used this idea to generate an automatic list of locations inside a district. Check out his world!

As you can see, this is a tool that gives you a lot of power over the organisation of your articles. We covered some of the ways it can be used, but I’m sure you will come up with your own! Share your ideas in the comments below!