[WikiEN-l] Policy on including templates in automatic categories

[Phil Boswell]

I've been altering templates, as and when I come across them, so that the 
template itself is **not** included in the category to which it 
automagically adds articles.

I've been doing this with a cunning combination of the <includeonly> and 
<noinclude> tags, which enable me to add in rubric to the template warning 
people that it adds articles to a category, and which category.

However I've just been reverted (here: http://tinyurl.com/7b7gw ) with the 
explanation "rv, it's important for these templates to be a member of their 
category".

First off, I disagree: I think it clutters up the categories pointlessly 
with **self references** which are evil(TM).

Second, in this particular case, the template doesn't even appear unless you 
know which letter to click in the {{CategoryTOC}}.

Third, the template is already documented in the category description (here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_covers ) perfectly adequately.

Whatever, I'm wondering whether there is a policy on this, since these tags 
are so new, and if so where is it?

Rather than enter into a revert war, I'd rather thrash it out properly 
first.

In parallel with this, I'm wondering whether there is a case for having more 
than one "category-like" namespace, so that we can have a separate set of 
"categories" for project-related stuff. For example, the automagic 
[[category:articles which survived deletion]] (or something like that 
anyway) was removed from the {{oldvfd/oldafd/oldvfdfull/oldafdfull}} 
templates, on the grounds that it was self-referential. The thing was that 
it is actually useful information to keep track of, and having one central 
place for it, rather than scanning laboriously "what links here" lists for 
several templates. It would have been nice if we could have had something 
like [[wikipedia-category:articles which survived deletion]] to keep this 
stuff in.

HTH HAND
-- 
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]