Perhaps, Kirby Phelps has a point in wanting a good number of categories at each article, but in my opinion it will not work. The purpose of categories is to navigate the wiki, not to introduce new information or echo what already exists - therefore, too many categories are perhaps worse than too few.

Let's take the shapeshifter example. We all know that: 1) while not all Quileutes are shapeshifters, all shapeshifters are Quileutes at least on their paternal side; 2) all shapeshifters are members of a pack; 3) with one exception, shapeshifters are all male. We can therefore infer a rule: mempership to a pack -> shapeshifter and male -> full-Quileute or part-Quileute on their paternal side. Categories will therefore reflect this rule: "Uley'…

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Some recent activity on categories made me feel that there's little or no consensus on them; it has not agreed upon which ones should be included directly on each page, which ones should be included higher up because they are implied in the lower-order ones. The main example I can bring is the categorization of shapeshifters - in the past week, there's been much adding and much deleting of the "shapeshifter", "male" and "Quileute" categories to the single shapeshifters' page. A number of people feel they should be explicitly added to the pages, a number of other people think (I among them) that the "Sam Uley's pack" or "Jacob Black's pack" categories are enough to indicate their species, gender and ethnicity - the only two exceptions, name…

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