User:SilviaASH/Categories are broken

Categories are a good idea in theory. However, in practice, they are often not particularly useful, primarily due to procedural inertia, which can be put down to a lack of editorial participation in their creation and organization.

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

It is easy for an editor to create useless or superfluous categories, or disrupt the organization of existing categories, with very little if any opposition. This can result in significant disruption, or just plain old cruft, which can often go unnoticed and unopposed for a while before being dealt with in any meaningful way. This is not, in itself, a serious problem: it is an expected consequence of Wikipedia's open editing model, and any category cruft should ideally be eliminated over time with further intervention by other editors.

However, there is a pointed deficiency in editorial participation at Categories for discussion, and with categories in general. Most people don't really notice categories or bother to edit them, and fewer still bother to comment at CfD, with many proposals there going with few or no responses, and sometimes ending up repeatedly relisted for weeks if not months, to little avail. It is difficult to attain a strong consensus for a change to a category at CfD, especially if the category in question relates to a relatively under-maintained topic area. Possibly, no one comments on a category proposal and it passes unopposed, possibly resulting in a change that may not actually be a good idea. Or, only a few people comment, possibly resulting in a change or lack thereof that only reflects a small local consensus of a few CfD regulars, and does not actually reflect what would be the best change to make for the project as a whole.

Compare this to AfD, which is highly trafficked and has many regular participants weighing in on whether or not articles should be deleted (or kept, or redirected, or whatever). There are many editors concerned with the state of the encyclopedia articles themselves, rather than their categories. Thus, AfD discussions are therefore likely to reflect a consensus that the wider community would agree with.

So, yeah. Categories are often a massive sandbox for people to just tag articles with whatever traits they think are of interest or make sense, in the same way that articles are, to some extent, a massive sandbox for people to just make new write-ups about whatever they think is interesting or notable. But one of these is getting way more attention than the other, so categories are broken, in the same way that the articles (and therefore Wikipedia as a whole) would be broken if fewer dedicated and experienced users were editing articles and participating in AfD discussions.

There's no silver bullet solution to fix this, but it would obviously be easier to attain a stronger and more decisive consensus for improvements to categories if more editors participated in categories more often, so if you're reading this, you should do that, I suppose.