It is used to build and maintain lists of pages—primarily for the sake of the lists themselves and their use in article and category maintenance. It is 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).
Typically, tracking categories are automatically populated by templates invoked in pages or by the MediaWiki software (see Special:TrackingCategories for an overview of the latter).