User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: August 16, 2011/@comment-4053809-20110817174436/@comment-957747-20110817184020

"It allows readers (you know, the people you're building the wiki for) to see what they expect to see when they click on a category link: a list of pages that use that category. In the old system, they were launched into an editing page, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever."

Thanks Jen. That rationale makes perfect sense. But surely, if you have the means to make a redlink category blue... wouldn't we be able to assume that you can make a .newcategory link open 'list of category' page to rather than an edit page? The way it is right now, it already does that. So what's the harm in adding CSS to visually alert the new(er) users to realize the category need some 'special attention'?

It's easy to change the link of redlink pages to navigate to the page itself rather than ?action=edit&redlink=1 I am just not sure how the rationale of "the links are now blue" equals "it's better for the users".

In all honesty, it's not. Per Gardimer above (thanks for placing all that in one spot, btw) users are oblivious anything needs to be done with these categories (yes, even admins). The visual indication that something is either wrong or needs work should be there for ALL users, not just the users that add custom CSS to see what MediaWiki already did for us.