This category contains maintenance categories which are sub-categorized by the month in which the article was tagged. This helps break some of the larger clean-up categories into manageable sections, and ensures that those articles which have been awaiting clean-up the longest can be dealt with first.

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This is a maintenance category, used for maintenance of the Wikipedia project. It is not part of the encyclopedia and contains non-article pages, or groups articles by status rather than subject. Do not include this category in content categories. This is a tracking category. It builds and maintains a list of pages primarily for the sake of the list itself. They are not part of the encyclopedia's categorization scheme. This category is hidden on its member pages—unless the corresponding user preference (Appearance → Show hidden categories) is set. These categories can be used to track, build and organize lists of pages needing "attention en masse" (for example, pages using deprecated syntax), or that may need to be edited at someone's earliest convenience. These categories also serve to aggregate members of several lists or sub-categories into a larger, more efficient list (discriminated by classifications).

A bot, currently AnomieBOT and formerly Cerabot~enwiki, will monitor the categories in this category and create the necessary monthly subcategories. Non-maintenance categories that are sub-categorized by the month in which the article was tagged should be placed in Category:Wikipedia categories sorted by month instead.

Note that the progress box on the right gives the number of pages in each category: It is effectively the backlog of the dating work done by various bots and other processes - typically something in the order of 1000 per day. It does not include in the dated subcategories, but other subcategories and possibly other pages which don't require dating will be counted. It also will multi-count pages with several undated template types.

• Wikipedia:Creating a dated maintenance category
• Category:Wikipedia backlog
• Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories
• Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month