User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: August 16, 2011/@comment-4053809-20110817174436/@comment-10370-20110817214300

Hi guys! Just saw this discussion. I was the Product Manager responsible for making the decision to use the Category Blue Links extension. As I know you guys can see, I'm very much a Wikia veteran. I saw some sitewide stats last year that said I was in the top 5 for all-time number of edits on Wikia -- I may have slipped on that list since then, but still pretty high. :)

The decision about blue category links was made for exactly the reason that Dopp said (and Jen repeated) -- the original MediaWiki definition of whether a category "exists" or not doesn't match up with a common sense understanding of "category". You would usually expect a category to "exist" because there are pages in that category. MediaWiki says that a category "exists" when a contributor opens an edit window on the category page, types something and clicks Publish. Even if there are 100 entries in that category -- it's not a real category until someone clicks the Publish button. That definition of "exists" is not common sense. When we look at newly-created wikis, it's very common to see a new founder adding lots of pages to categories but not realizing that the magic formula for turning category links blue is to type a word and hit Publish. We feel that the confusion this creates for readers and new contributors / wiki founders is enough of a problem that it was worth making an interface change that veteran wiki contributors could adjust to.

Responding to Charitwo's question about features enabled on Muppet Wiki -- the features that you mention are all optional for Wikia sites, and wiki communities are allowed to pick and choose among that set. Obviously, I founded Muppet Wiki, I've contributed a ton to it, and I love it very much, but I'm not the only person there. It's not entirely up to me whether we choose to use an optional feature, even if it's one that I worked on and like a lot. :)