User blog:RRabbit42/Category sprawl

Categories on a wiki like this can grow out of control. Some of that is due to adding them willy-nilly as an opinion rather than making an effort to help organize the pages. In some cases, the amount of categories is longer than the description on the page itself.

Near-duplicate categories
But another type of category sprawl comes from people adding the same category with a slight change. For example, look at these categories:

The only difference is that on the first line, the last word starts with a capital letter, and on the second line it isn't.

On a Windows computer, they would be the same thing. But on this wiki, they are treated as separate categories because of the differences in capitalization. As a result, all of these pages or categories would not be the same:


 * Bunny
 * BUNNY
 * BuNNY
 * BunnY
 * BuNnY
 * BUNNy

And so on. And that leads to category sprawl and clutter.

To avoid this, when typing in a category and the wiki makes a suggestion as to what category matches that, only add one.

Antagonists vs. Villains
Since this is a wiki about antagonists, almost all of the categories should say "antagonist" in them. There isn't a need to make a second category to say someone is a villain in that category.

If you have a "Comic relief antagonists" category, you don't need to duplicate it with "Comic relief villains". Just use the first one and add the "Villains" category. That way, you show that they also happen to be a villain without doubling the number of categories on the page.

Choosing a similar category
Another way avoid category sprawl is to see if another category would work better.If you have two near-identical categories of "Military Villains" and "Military villains", both can be replaced by "Soldiers". It's a shorter category that avoids the capitalization problem and it means the same thing.

If you want to see what categories have already been used, look at Special:Categories.

Administrators should also look at Special:UnusedCategories to see what category pages have been created but that category was never added to a page to see if they should be kept, and at Special:WantedCategories to see what categories people have been adding that do not have a description page yet. If a wanted category only has one or two members (pages that are using that category), consider removing the category from the page. In general, there should be at least three pages in a category to make it worthwhile having.