User blog comment:Dopp/Technical Update: June 28, 2011/@comment-1656630-20110701163329/@comment-1066636-20110701200137

I disagree with "it's making the experience of visiting a wiki make a lot more sense"; how is that so? On wikis, red links indicate a non-existent page - and if a category has not been added to the category tree, it is a non-existent page.

As for the "it's for the readers" argument; catering to readers is all nice and well, but ultimately you don't help them if you make maintenance increasingly harder for the editors.

Regarding "it allows readers to see what they expect to see when they click on a category link: a list of pages that use that category" - they could see the list prior to the change as well. That said, I can somewhat understand the "no editing screen" line of thought, but you're throwing out the baby with the bath water here; keeping the red link color but not showing the editing screen when going to the page (i.e. showing what you'd see without the "redlink=1" parameter) would have accomplished the same goal without making life significantly harder for the editors.

Plus it seems you're missing the point that on established wikis, red-linked categories do not need to be created at least half of the time - the rest of the time, they serve as an easily visible indicator that the one who put it there got the category name wrong and that it needs to be corrected.