[WikiEN-l] what's the deal with categories?

[Ray Saintonge]

Viajero wrote:

>Maybe I have been out of the loop but just what is the purpose of Categories? 
>
>Just now I noticed that someone went through a bunch of pages I was watching and added the cateogry "Opera Composer" which seems entirely logical for the relevant articles, except that we have already have a page [[List of opera composers]]. Does this mean that this article is redundant? My personal instinct, which may or may not be relevant here, is not to do things in two different ways when one suffices. Will people continue to update the handmade lists now that Categories pages are available in such cases of redundancy as this? If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.
>
Yes and no.  To some extent the manual lists are wish lists with empty 
links appearing in red.  The category system can't pick up list elements 
that don't exist.  Any manual list should probably receive a category 
tag as well.  In a closed end subject or one that is effectively 
closed-ended (such as the list of US presidents) there are strong 
arguments from deleting the list when pages exist for all its elements.  
The list of opera composers, however, is open-ended and should probably 
remain so that new names can be added, and we can know which have been 
done and which remain to be done.

Ec