Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-32704847-20200504234907



Matter
In my short wiki editor experience, I could never accept having pages and categories with the same name/subject as a good practice. For example:


 * Gamepedia | Minecraft - Mob
 * Gamepedia | Minecraft - Category:Mobs

Origins
Most wikis follow these paths before getting to this point: In both cases they end up at the same point: having a page and a category roughly covering the same subject. And this certainly causes confusion for (new) users, that will never know if they should search for a common page or a category. It's not consistent. The more I see it as a common practice, the more it disturbs me.
 * They either start tagging some articles and grouping them under a category, and then they feel the need for describing that group of articles.
 * Or, they start describing that generic group on a regular page, and then they feel the need to assemble many other articles under that common description.

Experts say it
On August 2019 FishTank gave us some nice tips about categories:

Fandom modified the typical function of Category pages in 2018, dramatically improving their search engine visibility and making them more important to our community organization. In short, Categories now hold as much weight or more as landing pages in search engine results as articles do, making them more ideal pillar pages. User blog:FishTank

Consideration
If "categories hold as much weight or more as landing pages", why should users click on a second link to access the description of that category? Why would an user arriving at "Category:Mobs" be force to click on "Mobs" page to see the generic description of that group called "Mobs"?

Pages that function like categories usually have interesting comparative tables with the most relevant stats of the items they contain, sometimes even with icons. Compared to this, empty category pages are useless, ugly and much hated. A November 2018 update improved categories a bit, but in my opinion only to deepen the consistency problem even more.

It makes no sense and I've always had difficulty to deal with this dilemma. Even among editors it can be confusing, as we do not know how to organize the content hierarchy. We either end up with a somewhat useless category page containing a (befor ugly, now meh) list of pages and a link to the description page; or we have to create/maintain/update the descriptions for both page and category.

Advise?
I've tried redirects, transclusions, wiki policies, and I couldn't come to a reasonable solution on how to deal with it. What would you suggest? Sorry, I couldn't resist using this fancy style. I won't do it again ~(˘▾˘~)  