Thread:Mark Otaris/@comment-26222829-20150913021849/@comment-4812386-20150913043805

If you look at the pages where I removed these categories, you'll see that they're still appearing in them and that the categories' names appear at the bottom. This is because the infobox templates automatically categorize the articles they're added to depending on the information they're given. The advantages of having this done by the infobox templates is that the categorization is consistent, that nothing is missing, and that we can add new categories or rename existing ones directly by modifying the template, instead of having to edit each page manually, which would be a lot more tedious.

Since the categorization is done automatically, it is pointless to put the articles manually in the categories, and this is in fact harmful because it makes it very difficult to clean things up when we want to change the name of a category, to get rid of one or when articles are incorrectly put in a category.

For this reason, a number of categories should never be added manually to articles. This is noted at the top of the category page for these categories. If you look at Category:Hats and Category:Catalog items, for example, you'll see a banner at the top indicating that Category:Hats should be added to pages only automatically, by the infobox, and that Category:Catalog items should never be added to articles because it is only meant to contain subcategories.