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).

Shortcut CAT:CLN

These articles (mostly under Category:Articles needing cleanup) are in need of general cleanup. Please see Wikipedia:Cleanup or the articles' talk pages for reasons why. If you're not sure why the tag is there, you can ask on the talk page, ask the person who added the tag, ask for a third opinion, or ask for an expert opinion on WP:RFC or a WikiProject. If you're sure the article has been cleaned up, addressing any obvious flaws as well as any specific problems mentioned on the talk page, feel free to remove the tag. There's not much harm in leaving it on if you aren't certain what to do; the tag will alert someone else to come by later and check up on the article.

"Cleanup" is a generic label and is a subset of "maintenance". It encompasses all remedial work that needs to be done, whereas other maintenance lists may contain suggestions for improvement to intact articles.

Please ignore the Wikipedia: listings. These appear here for technical reasons. They do not need to be cleaned up, and the tags should not be removed.

Use the {{ cleanup}} tag to put articles in Category:Articles needing cleanup. Please do not subst the cleanup tag. The bot that sorts cleanup into by-month categories is currently unable to handle subst'ed cleanup tags. Additionally other processes are likely to break the subst'ed tags. This category is a self-reference.

Purge the cache.

See also

• Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup