Jim Wilson wrote:
I agree with making a MW system message or $wg control this - but which should be the default? Edit or view?
View
Not "Edit." Category pages do not need edited "content" to be useful although defining the category with a sentence or two can help. The useful content of a category pages is instead the auto generated list of pages that contain that category's tag, eg [[Category:Category-name-here]].
*Regular pages* do and should send users to the Edit page automatically if the page is empty but category pages are never "empty" -- they always contain their auto-generated note at minimum and should not open an edit box needlessly. The edit box confuses folks who simply want to read the auto-generated list of links.
Roger Chrisman