`  ::  It looks like you think.  I'm glad that has sunk in. :: These are synonyms for the main topic. They're synonyms that appear to have arisen from international conventions (Have you ever worked on EU standards bodies? I have.) They're not trivial spelling variations, they're linguistically quite distinct. It is not obvious from one name that the other exists. A reader searching for one name will not easily see the others. This category  is far from ``lightly populated``, it contains over 60 entries so far - a page full of text, too much to easily eyeball. There are 14 redirects pointing to this page: most are (as you suggest) trivial spelling variations of metre/meter. These are not categorized. No-one is trying to categorize them. Those which are categorized are the three quite separate linguistic stems. Besides, it's a big topic and has potential for even more growth if editors expand it. :: You claim a dogmatic policy, ``a category should not be placed on a redirect if the target article has the same category applied to it; `` Yet this is simply your invention and is no part of the relevant guideline. Policy is not invented ad hoc to suit by editors, even you. :: Yes, I want to waste time on a heavily redundant categorization. I feel sorry for the poor CPUs and this extra workload, but that's just what they're for. Better to waste the time of some silicon than a reader's. As far as human effort goes, listing these alternate names visibly is justified by both our guidelines and the likely use cases of readers. :: you aren't terribly familiar with  I've a fairly large WP edit count. My Mediawiki edit count dwarfs yours (and I work on Mediawikis where categorization is used, unlike WP). Lose the patronising ``I'm an admin, you're a newbie`` attitude.   `