See [[Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh]] for an example of how this results in categories taking up much more space than they should. There may have been desire to allow a little more space between categories, but I doubt this much extra space was intended.
The extra space around the categories is caused by the vertical line between them. This used to be a pipe character, but is now something created in CSS. The relevant tags are <div id='catlinks' class='catlinks'>, <div id="mw-normal-catlinks"> and <div id="mw-hidden-catlinks" class="mw-hidden-cats-user-shown"> but I have no idea which CSS file sets up these ids and classes.
Having the links not wrap looks useful, we do that manually in navboxes all the time. However, the gobs of extra spacing is useless, I also think it needs to be toned down, maybe not to how it was before but certainly somewhat.
It was there before, but the text didn't wrap the same way so you didn't notice it. If we're going to be using this {{nowraplinks}}-like style for categories, we might as well make the separator work like {{middot}}.
CSS code for users' monobook.css/vector.css/common.css is listed (and works) at de:Wikipedia:Fragen_zur_Wikipedia#MW118:_Kategorienanzeige. Although I am tempted to suggest that this CSS code should be for everyone by default - especially in monoboook.
For those who don't speak German, try adding this to either Special:MyPage/common.css or Special:MyPage/skin.css:
/* Reduce space around category links, allow word wrapping - see [[:de:Wikipedia:Fragen zur Wikipedia#MW118: Kategorienanzeige]] */
#catlinks li {
display: inline; border-left: none; padding: 0;
}
#catlinks li:first-child { padding-left: 0; }
#catlinks li:before { content: " | "; }
#catlinks li:first-child:before { content: ""; }
Version: 1.18.x
Severity: normal