Special pages are the wiki’s reports about itself. They aren’t articles anyone writes; they’re generated from the link graph, the categories, and the history, and they recompute as the wiki changes. Their job is to surface the loose ends a growing wiki accumulates, so tidying up becomes a matter of working down a list rather than remembering what needs doing.
The most-used report is recent changes — a running feed of every edit across the wiki, newest first, with the riskier-looking ones flagged. It’s where a maintainer starts the day, and where the moderation tools hang off each entry. A related view, new pages, shows just the pages that have appeared, which is the natural place to give a newcomer’s first article a quick look.
Several reports come straight out of how pages link to each other, and each points at a different kind of gap:
Work those three down and the wiki stays navigable: every page reachable, every page a way onward, and the most-wanted gaps filled first.
Other reports just help you see the shape of things — all pages, all categories, a contributor’s history, the review queue. None of it needs maintaining, because none of it is stored; it’s all read back out of the content whenever you ask.