Special:Categories hides existing categories currently having 0 members.
This has has several drawbacks:
- When Special:Categories is used to find an appropriate category for a new article, and a category page has already been set up explicitly for this article type, it is not found. → Authors 'invent' their own categories. → Goodbye orderly development of a wiki!
- Categories meant for QA purposes tend to be temporarily empty, when all pending work is done. While it may be nice to see to-do-lists shrink, it is counterproductive, when you do not see where to place a new QA job.
- In wikies using multiple languages, authors very often insert category tags in the language they actually use, resulting in various duplications of categories. (Same applies to misspelled, and variant-spelled category names) During cleanup of such situations, it is vital that one gets a complete and comprehensive list of all there is, most specifically already created category pages.
(Currently, you need to have several windows of Special:Categories open (in chunks of 5000s sorted top down) and even more Special:Allpages (in chunks of 200, sorted 3 per row left to right) → finding related entries, or dupliates, is a real pain in the ass. Excuse me. I want to say, it's frustrating, and consuming much too much time) - There are likely more problems, which I just did not enocounter up to now.
Suggestion: include all existing category pages in Special:Categories, even if there are 0 members to the category.
Enhancement suggestion: If there is a justification for the current behaviour of Special:Categories, make it selectable by user input. In this case, I'd suggest to add a "show only categories with more than [ ... ] members" selection, which likely comes handy to avoid the disturbing 5000 limit sometimes, too. If you want to make it more comfortable, add another selection and make it: "show only categories with more than/less than [ N ] members"
Hint: If the 0 members problem, at least, is avoidable with the upcoming report extension, and we will be able to use the report extension in the Wikipedia installations, I for one would not mind waiting for it, and not pursue this bug any further.
Version: 1.11.x
Severity: major
URL: http://ksh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Categories&limit=5555&offset=0