When to use

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This is not a critical maintenance template. Special:UncategorizedPages automatically collects all uncategorized articles, whether they have this template or not. The list is usually quite short; at any given point in time, perhaps one out of each million articles is missing categories.

This template has the most potential for being useful when both the article and the main editor are new. Experienced editors rarely forget to add categories (so adding it is a waste of everyone's time and energy), and if the page was created more than a day or two ago, then the problem is usually vandalism or accidental blanking of the lower part of the article.

Usage

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  • It is recommended that this template be placed at the bottom of the page, where readers will look for the categories, although it is a somewhat common practice among some editors to put it at the top.
  • This template will add tagged pages to Category:Uncategorized pages or dated subcategories thereof.
  • This template detects the namespace it is employed in and adjusts the wording accordingly.
    • It will produce no output if used in any of the following namespaces, which per WP:USERNOCAT/WP:DRAFTNOCAT are not supposed to be categorised
      1. User
      2. User talk
      3. Draft
      4. Draft talk
  • Please do not subst: this template.
  • The following code is the recommended use; it will produce the uncategorized template with an appropriate date as its parameter:
{{Uncategorized|date=December 2024}}
  • If you forgot to add the date, a bot will add it later.

When used on a page with a stub category a note that stub categories do not count for the purposes of this template is added. This can be overridden by setting |stub= to yes or no.

See also

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