Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Transclusion

Procedure
To list a category for deletion, merging or renaming, follow this process:

Once you have previewed your entry, please make sure to add your signature after your proposal. If nominating a list of entries as a batch below your rationale, it is somewhat neater to place these after the signature (rather than leave the signature dangling at the end of the list, apparently unrelated to your reasons).

Once you have submitted a category here, no further action is necessary on your part. If the nomination is supported, helpful administrators and editors will log the result and ensure that the change is implemented to all affected pages.

Also, consider adding to your watchlist any categories you nominate. This will help ensure that your nomination tag is not mistakenly or deliberately removed.

Users without accounts and users with new accounts
Users without accounts (anonymous users) may nominate and comment on proceedings, just as in Articles for Deletion (AfD). Comments from anonymous users or users who have made very few edits may be taken less seriously, or even ignored. See Sock puppetry and Suffrage for details.

Redirecting categories
It is our general policy to delete categories that do not have articles in them. Unlike articles, categories are mostly for internal use only. If they don't have any articles, they shouldn't have any links from any articles or any other categories, because they are not useful for navigation and classification.

However, some categories frequently have articles assigned to them accidentally, or are otherwise re-created over and over again. In these cases, we use a form of "soft" redirection.

Categories cannot be redirected using "hard" redirects ( #REDIRECT target ) due to limitations in the MediaWiki software. Instead, use . Helpful bots patrol these categories and move articles into the redirect targets.

You can see a list of redirected categories in Category:Wikipedia soft redirected categories.