Manual:PopulateCategory.php

Details
populateCategory.php file is a maintenance script to populate the table. This table keeps track of how many articles, files and subcategories are in a category. It is also used for displaying information on Special:Categories page. This script is automatically run by update.php if updating from before MediaWiki 1.13.

This script was removed for MediaWiki version 1.36 and later.

If you have incorrect counts of how many articles are in a category, see instead.