# Getting Wikipedia categories to populate?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 11, 2016, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261 "2016-10-11T18:05:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Anduinel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/848f3c/32.png) [@Anduinel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anduinel)\
**Post date:** [October 11, 2016, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261/1 "2016-10-11T18:05:39Z")

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Novice coder here, picking my way through my first wiki.

I had some old world-building stuff stashed on a friend’s wiki and decided I’d transfer it to one of my own. I exported all the pages I wanted to XML. Set up the new wiki with MediaWiki (same program my friend was using). Uploaded all the pages. And hey - the links all work. Uploaded all the old images again and they show up fine. I made a couple of minor revisions, they all link fine. Everything’s great.

Except that the category pages refuse to populate. Page that should have about three hundred entries on them are showing just one or none, and I can’t figure it out. I didn’t see any issues with the code. I even went back and uploaded the old category pages instead of just creating new ones. Nope.

There don’t seem to be any permissions that need to be reset; category pages are supposed to populate automatically. So I’m kind of stumped. Any thoughts?

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**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2016, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261/2 "2016-10-12T02:03:31Z")

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Try running this script to regenerate the categories:

[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Rebuildall.php](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Rebuildall.php)

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**Author:** ![Anduinel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/848f3c/32.png) [@Anduinel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anduinel)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2016, 8:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261/3 "2016-10-12T08:51:08Z")

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Success! Thanks!

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**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\
**Post date:** [October 13, 2016, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/getting-wikipedia-categories-to-populate/768261/4 "2016-10-13T04:05:05Z")

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> [@Anduinel](#):
>
> Success! Thanks!

Huzzah!