It is used to build and maintain lists of pages—primarily for the sake of the lists themselves. They are not part of the encyclopedia's categorization scheme.
These categories are 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).
The error message suggests a periodical parameter that matches the template, but there is no requirement to use the suggested parameter; any one of these periodical parameters may be used:
|journal=
|magazine=
|newspaper=
|periodical=
|website=
|work=
In some cases, an incorrect template has been used (e.g. {{cite journal}} for a web page, book, or standalone document). The appropriate resolution in these cases is to change the incorrect template to {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, or a different, more appropriate template.
↑Pages in the Category talk, Draft talk, File talk, Help talk, MediaWiki talk, Module talk, Portal talk, Talk, Template talk, User, User talk, and Wikipedia talk namespaces are not included in the tracking categories. In addition, pages with names matching the patterns '/[Ss]andbox', '/[Tt]estcases', '/[^/]*[Ll]og', and '/[Aa]rchive' are not included in the tracking categories.