All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXVII

[GethN7]

Still doing lots and lots and lots of cleanup on the wiki...

Somebody give me a convincing reason why I shouldn't simply redirect Category:Index Index to Special:Categories and let MediaWiki automation do at least that much of the cleanup work. I see no reason to manually replicate an automated list.

Technical explanation in the simplest way possible:

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:Categories

This is just a list of all categories for EVERYTHING. This includes maintenance, categories included with imported content that is not trope/work-related, hidden utility ones, and lots of other trivia that is not entirely needed for us to look at all the time.

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Category:Index_Index

This, on the other hand, are the actual content categories, all the things that court as things the average reader will care about or have good reason to peruse. This is just groups all that "relevant to the average site reader and editor" content" together, while the former makes no distinctions between this and background stuff not of strict importance to the former.

That might be what it was intended to be, but it isn't what it's become over the years. Everything gets dumped into Category:Index Index because that's what's on the boilerplate, and nobody bothers to change it.

If that's what you want Index Index to be (and I don't see why, because with over 65 thousand entries it's far too large for any "average reader" to use), then you're going to have to clean it up.

The only content that should be in the Index Index is what is is in the main namespace. Everything else that is template, MediaWiki pages (barring certain policy pages that may have overlap), or otherwise not pertinent to the main namespace should be removed from the Index Index.