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

[Stan Shebs]

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 If not, they should be deleted, as outdated lists are a help to nobody.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, completely-filled-in and alphabetized but otherwise bare lists
don't offer much over a category, but the most useful lists add
annotations that help the reader find a desired entry without having
to click on every entry just to see what's there. I think it will be
a while before something as elaborate (and useful) as [[list of
battles]] can be auto-constructed from category tags!

Stan