Wikipedia talk:Creating a dated maintenance category

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Help please

Hi, I have modified {{attribute}} and been trying to set it up as a separate monthly maintenance category. It was previously associated Category:Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases. I am doing this since the issues tagged potentially arise from issues broader than just weasel words.

The base category is Category:Wikipedia articles needing words, phrases or quotes attributed. It does appear at Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month.
The base category is populated with monthly categories that are historical. I created the current month. I tagged my talk page. The current month has not been populated. The counter counts no instances.
See Category:All Wikipedia articles needing words, phrases or quotes attributed. ~~It is unpopulated.~~ Just now, populated but with only one older article.

Also created are:

Initially, I had the counter category as follows but changed to above, thinking that might be the problem.

Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles needing words, phrases or quotes attributed) counter

I left things for 12 hours but with no real change. I just edited the template to set the "All category" to the cat parameter. I used the clarify template as a boilerplate initially and this wasn't used. Was this the problem? Is there some other problem? Do I just have to wait for the bots to do their thing? Will the bot look at my talk page or do I need to test it on an article?

TIA Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 01:38, 18 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Cinderella157: Are you referring to monthly category creation or categories populating? The latter can take a while. For the former, I'm not sure what AnomieBOT uses as a trigger to create the monthly categories, but things are working now. I've made a few changes (1, 2, 3) and marked Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles needing words, phrases or quotes attributed) counter for deletion. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:12, 18 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@JJMC89, Thankyou for looking over my shoulder. I can see where I made a circular category reference. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cinderella157 (talk • contribs) 04:56, 18 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

AnomieBOT created the current month's category about 40 minutes after the parent category was created.

When a template is edited to change the categories it populates, it generally takes some time for the categories to be populates as MediaWiki's job queue works its way through all the pages transcluding the template. There's little that can be done to speed this up. Anomie ⚔ 20:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]