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