Immediately after the MW 1.19 update, the category display area at the bottom of pages (#catlinks) stopped wrapping. This is definitely a 1.19 "thing", as it's no happening on wikis that have not yet converted. Looks like the css properties word-break and text-wrap don't really have wide support, or maybe they just need browser-specific coding (i.e. webkit-text-wrap). In any event, word-break doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Example of the behavior can be found at, for instance, tardis:Journey's End (TV story) or memoryalpha:Spock.

Anybody got a fix?
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">16:07: Thu 09 Aug 2012 

Since no one has answered in a few days, I'm going to assume that means our hive mind is stumped. I'm therefore going to bump this up to {{staff needed}} just in case it's an actual bug.
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">23:44: Sat 11 Aug 2012 

^In this screenshot of the memory alpha page you linked (taken in the Chrome browser), categories appear to be wrapping just fine as far as I can tell. Are you seeing something different? Or maybe I didn't understand what you meant? Mathmagician ƒ(♫) 02:58 UTC, Sun, 12 August 2012

I can confirm that categories are wrapping for me on said page in Firefox 17.0α1. As a temporary workaround, you might want to try adding the following to MediaWiki:Common.css:

#catlinks {
	word-wrap: break-word;
}

This property is more generally accepted as far as I know.

The above picture demonstrates the problem, not that things are okay. Prior to the upgrade, the category "Starfleet captains" would have been on two lines: "Starfleet" on line 2 and "captains" on line 3. Thus, heavily categorised pages — and Spock here isn't all that categorised — are taking many more lines, more vertical space, than necessary overall.

I've tried this in the bleeding-edge latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. None of them are "breaking" category names as they should. While a workaround is good — and I'm happy to try it — I really wonder whether this is the "new normal". Do Wikia really want this behaviour, or is it a change that's slipped under their radar?
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">15:59: Mon 13 Aug 2012 

I think the tardis example might be a little more telling:

See what's happening here? The whole left margin is a wall of pipe separators. It's kinda mathematically impossible for each line to begin with a pipe separator unless the whole category name is being treated like an unbreakable block of text.
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">16:18: Mon 13 Aug 2012 

What's happened with 1.19 is that the whole of the category links now comes as an unnumbered list. Maybe that's why a single category name won't wrap anymore.--PedroM (talk) 17:18, August 13, 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, the word-wrap fix as suggested above doesn't solve this problem in the latest (as of today) versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera or Chrome.
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">17:20: Mon 13 Aug 2012 

(Reset indent) PedroM is right. This CSS should remedy the problem:

.mw-normal-catlinks li {
display: inline;
}

Thanks for reporting this, and for the great examples. A bug has been filed with the Engineering team, including a link to this thread, and I'll post an update here where there is something to report. BertH (help forum | blog) 17:27, August 13, 2012 (UTC)

Cool. I didn't think it was really expected behaviour. I hope the Engineering team are able to fix the bug, so that the default condition is proper wrapping. In the meantime, though, TK-999's proposed fix does indeed solve the problem. So thanks to both of you!
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">18:55: Mon 13 Aug 2012 

Just to round out our gallery, here's what the catlink section should look like. This is is what TK-999's solution achieves, and what categories looked like back in MW 1.16.

Again, though, this is not current default behaviour in MW 1.19. This requires the CSS fix of:

.mw-normal-catlinks li { display: inline; }

As you can see it saves an entire vertical line of text (i.e. ~ 1em of height)
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">19:02: Mon 13 Aug 2012 

The fault lies at "li {display:inline-block}", jftr.--PedroM (talk) 00:38, August 14, 2012 (UTC)

This was indeed a change in MW 1.19, so not a "bug" per se. I imagine the reason for the change was for readability. Note that Wikipedia works this way as well. What would you say bothers you more, the increased used of vertical space, or the "wall of pipe separators"? This may not be something that we will change, in light of the option to "fix" it with CSS as needed (thanks, TK-999!) but I wanted to get your thoughts. BertH (help forum | blog) 22:19, August 15, 2012 (UTC)

Well, I should confess that I personally am not that fussed. I'm representing the interests of other admin on my wiki. If you want feedback of someone more passionate about this issue, you might want to shoot a personal message to Mini-mitch. As you've pointed out, it's like this on Wikipedia, and has been for a while now. But if pressed, I'd say that what bugs me more is the wall of separators. The change I'd probably push for is the elimination of separators that exist at the beginning of a line. It makes little visual sense to start out a line with a pipe if that pipe is only 5px from a border-left.
czechout ☎ ✍ from tardis  <span style="">04:44: Thu 16 Aug 2012 

At this time, we will not be making any changes around this issue, but the previously mentioned CSS option is great for anyone who wants to change the category wrapping behavior on their wiki. You can see it in action on tardis!

BertH (help forum | blog) 19:02, August 24, 2012 (UTC)