Community Suggestion: Article with multiple parents
Article with multiple parents
Feature Upgrade · Articles & templates · Created by EleKTriiK
declined
What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?
I would like the ability to add multiple parents to a single article. I would personally use this as I want to put factions and organizations under the realms in which they are active, but for organizations that are active accross multiple realms, it is not possible to do it.How does this feature request address the current situation?
The ability to link multiple parent articles to an article would allow said organization to be easily linked under each of the realms in which this organization is active.What are other uses for this feature request?
The ability to link articles to one another like that could ease the way content is displayed and the way people navigate the world within World Anvil. My organization is just an example, but something similar could be used to have people belonging to multiple organizations easily linked to those multiple organizations. However, something rather similar can be achieved with a tag list under the article; it just feels less clean and easy to manage for me, hence the feature proposal, but we'll see with votes if I'm the only one interested in the addition.The Team's Response
Thanks for the suggestion! This is declined because it's not the intended usecase of categories or parents, which are designed to be one-to-many relationships. If you want a many-to-many relationship hierarchy, you can use tags. With tags you can generate automatic lists of all articles that have any given tag, which can be used as a parallel organization system.
Current score
20/300 Votes · +3900 points
Votes Cast
-
-300
by SoulLink
on 2026-07-16 11:06This would add necessary complexity and design requirements, how would this interact with bread crumbs? What would be the parent linked at the bottom? How would the UI display that something is in more than one place?
-
+300
by A Adorable Dragon
on 2026-07-11 22:54 -
+300
by JGulia,DM
on 2026-07-11 03:26It would also be helpful to link professions under an organization to help accommodate guilds including guilds with multiple professions included.
-
+100
by AmevelloBlue
on 2026-07-08 20:04 -
+300
by AvengerSteel
on 2026-07-08 08:58 -
+300
by Charles_Fairweather
on 2026-07-06 08:35 -
+100
by Jupiter Melichios
on 2026-07-03 12:49While I agree this would be nice, I suspect the reason we can't do it is that additional connections would increase database load.
-
+100
by Drawkill Dragon
on 2026-06-29 00:00 -
+300
by MPvDgamer
on 2026-06-28 23:33 -
+300
by FzN!
on 2026-06-28 07:00 -
+300
by ISpeakDragonese
on 2026-06-27 16:41 -
+100
by FictionFan1995
on 2026-06-27 10:24 -
+300
by tolleydm
on 2026-06-27 03:08 -
+100
by Never-born Publishing
on 2026-06-26 19:45 -
+1
by RailenPanther
on 2026-06-26 13:30 -
+300
by Kyberian
on 2026-06-23 23:39I have to admit, I would find this incredibly useful. It makes my brain bleed to think about explaining tags to some of my players, whereas a tree structure, even when more than one parent is involved, is immediately comprehensible. No matter how technically competent a world anvil user is, sometimes their readers aren't.
-
+300
by BossmanDFE
on 2026-06-22 16:37 -
+300
by Kilgs
on 2026-06-20 23:56 -
+100
by ss2020
on 2026-06-16 17:21 -
-1
by Those2Nerds
on 2026-06-15 19:12This has been requested and declined several times before. The dev response has been "This is not how categories work or are able to work". Topics in the real world and our fictional ones often defy strict categorization, but tools like tagged lists and whiteboards can help us show different connections in different contexts. We have to choose one category structure, but we can make indices of tagged lists as much* as we want. (*Probably?)
-
+300
by EleKTriiK
on 2026-06-15 17:28
Find your way!
Resources
WHO WE ARE
LEGAL
Listen to our Podcast
by 3 Armored Kittens · Prodromos v.1.1 - World Anvil 0.9.15.050 © 2017-2025 [en] | Anvil Time: 14:32, Oct 12 2026