This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Wiki categorization is used to organize articles not only for the readers, but also to organize them based on their current state, and the current work that needs to be done to them. Editors who have an ongoing interest in maintaining and refining the content can then look to the categories that contain articles requiring work done in their area of interest.

Once the work has been completed to a satisfactory level in each of its deficient areas, it is removed from that category. In many cases, the article may be moved into another category if a sequence of processes are needed to be done to it in a specific order by different roles. This kind of "movement" from one category to another based on the kind of tasks needing to be done to an article is called workflow and is used in most organizational and project management contexts. Similar concepts are also used in distributed computing environments so that many processors can work together on large jobs with minimal communications between each other being required.

The Wikipedia project uses hundreds of pages and categories to manage the vast workflow involved in maintaining so many articles. Here are some example categories making up Wikipedia's workflow:

• Category:Articles copied to Wikibooks in need of cleanup
• Category:Articles with dead external links

Obviously these are all oriented toward presentation and publication due to the nature of the Wikipedia project's work, but the general idea can apply easily to any manner of organization. It's the general concept of creating an idea or collection of goals as an article and categorizing it based on the roles and processes which are currently required to act on it. Each role which acts on it can then remove it from their category and add it to the next role's category who needs to work on it. Many organizations and projects using wikis to collaborate on their documents and other content are moving a wide variety of content into their wiki environment so that it can benefit from this method of organized workflow.

• Category:Wikipedia administration – Articles relating to the many threads of Wikipedia administration
• Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current) – Wikipedia's current wiki-workflow categories
• Categorization – encyclopedic article about categorization
• Workflow – encyclopedic article on the general concept of workflow