User blog comment:Sarah Manley/New Editor Scheduled for Sitewide Release/@comment-3441771-20110916020037/@comment-126761-20110916120320

To link to a category page, and not include something in a category, the wikitext you need to type is  <-- note the extra ' '. The link dialog deals with this automatically :)

I think you may be running into a known bug in the first part: for some reason the visual mode category tool asks you to press enter again after choosing a suggestion - we should be getting a fix out for that soon.