[19:44:21] <Ciell_>	 Hi! I'm searching for research done on the usage of categories. Who uses them, what are they mainly used for, are they a substitute for A-Z lists, etc. I cannot find anything with the search on meta, but I'm sure there has been research in which this topic was included at least. 
[19:44:43] <Ciell_>	 Can anyone point me in the right direction please? 
[19:50:58] <Ciell>	 Or maybe: how do people navigate Wikipedia? (readers vs editors)
[19:52:42] <Ciell>	 In my experience most readers and new contributors do not even realize our categories are categories: they seem to look at them as 'labels', and think nothing else of it. Are categories more for the experienced user, or would that be a false assumption? 
[21:31:34] <Emufarmers>	 Ciell: I thought the purpose of categories was to give editors something to fight over
[21:32:03] <isaacj>	 Ciell: your guess makes sense to me (only editors really use categories to find content) but I don't know of any hard data. This seems supported by categories not showing up in the mobile version / apps but I don't know where that decision was documented (and if it was intuition or based on data)
[21:35:04] <isaacj>	 i'm also pretty sure category pages aren't included in the clickstream dataset (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstream) so unfortunately can't help you solve your question with that
[22:12:03] <Ciell>	 Thank you isaacj!