On 7/27/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
I would say that for a category to be considered to "exist" it needs to be related to other categories (and, via these, the rest of the category tree). So to exist it needs to be categorised (contain the text "[[Category:Foo]]"), and so be no longer red. Therefore, redcategories typically indicate unlinked (and unuseful) categories.
Honestly, category relations aren't particularly useful in MediaWiki at the moment. Since there's no category math, and there's no way of seeing all items in all subcategories on one page, intercategory links are no more useful -- for the time being -- than normal interpage links.
There are also cases where categories do not need to belong to another category to be "useful", like "1911 Encyclopaedia" or "Pages needing cleanup" or whatever. They can be made *even more useful* by categorising, but that's not saying much...
Steve