Some categories on this site are empty – they do not contain any files or pages. Some of these categories are redirects, disambiguation pages, maintenance categories or item categories intended and supposed to be populated. Unuseful empty categories can be speedily deleted per criteria C2.

Reports

• Categories with nonexisting categories (redcats) that are empty
  • Some of them should get fixed, nearly all of them should be deleted.
• Categories with only infobox meta categories that are empty
  • Many categories with only infobox categories are either disambiguation categories or have an image set in the Wikidata item. To the former (at least usually) {{Disambig}} should be added (which puts the page into a category). To the latter something special may often need to be done such as merging or renaming the category or adding media to the category.
• All empty categories on Commons without redirects and disambigs

Types of empty categories to be kept

There are several special types of empty categories that should be kept if they are useful and correctly named:

• Maintenance categories
• Category redirects
• Dissambiguation category pages
• Other categories intended and supposed to be populated. Creating or keeping a category that are not populated yet may make sense, for example, when it is part of complete series of subcats. It has been argued such categories that are part of a natural series or set where all or almost all of the others are populated should not be deleted. Creating or keeping an empty category for a relevant topic, if its future populating can be assumed, may also make sense to determine the correct systematic name, prepare systematic categorization of such an item and to display basic Wikidata about the item in the infobox shortly before the category is expected to be populated. It is advised to mark such a category with {{Systematic header}} or {{Prospective category}} template to emphasize that it shouldn't be deleted.

Indexing

These category pages should not be indexed by search engines. According to TheDJ, using the NOINDEX magic word breaks the way google updates their indexes to a degree that makes if very difficult to change the page back to being indexed, and as such should not be used on pages that frequently change and where people have an expectation that the page should show up in indexes quickly once the no index command is removed. There would be a problem with the, as of October 2024, many empty categories if they are index.

Content of empty categories

Empty categories display this note:

There are no pages or files in this category.

This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).

See also

• Relevant discussions: Page?/Noindex, Delete?, Proposal:Delete, Criteria for speedy deletion phrasing 2018 discussion. …
• Template:How to delete empty categories
• Template:SDC2
• Template:Empty category
• Commons:Audio and video requests – one of several places to request media