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This (RfC draft from 2010) mainly concerns 4 page types. Indexes, Lists of lists, BasicTopicOutlines, and Glossaries. These types are individually fretted over for related concerns – scope, notability, page-structure, minimum quality-level, namespace, existence, naming convention, etc – on a perennial schedule. It is difficult for many of these to meet Featured List criteria.
Problems for discussion
edit- Is "Navigational pages" a good way to group these various types? What better ways are there to describe or group them?
- What requirements do they need to meet? (Beyond having a clear scope, and being useful to readers)
- How would it be helpful/harmful to move some of these, or all of these, to a different Namespace? How else could the disputes be resolved?
Background and Scope
editThe root list, Portal:Contents, was named/located at [Wikipedia:Category schemes] from 2001-2006. (eg Nov 2005 sample diff). It's been linked from the Main Page almost constantly since creation, and from the MediaWiki:Sidebar since March 2007.
Some of these page-types are purely listings of articles that Wikipedia has, grouped by topic (and structure) - eg Lists of people and List of statistics articles - Hence they would not satisfy general notability as "articles".
All the page types have been around for years, but work over the last few years to cleanup/improve/expand/coordinate some of them (particularly outlines, glossaries, and indexes) has led to disagreements with a few editors, leading to much discussion in dozens of locations.
Types of page that could be called "navigational"
edit- Purely:
- Lists of lists - (e.g. Lists of people, Lists of mathematics topics, List of decades, Lists of hospitals) - (101 AfDs)
- Indexes of topics - (e.g. Index of psychology articles, Index of fishing articles, List of mathematics articles (updated daily by User:Mathbot)) - (22 afds)
- many other Lists[1]
- Partially:
- Outlines - (e.g., "Outline of Japan", "Outline of law", "Outline of mathematics", etc.)[2] (10 + 20 AfDs, and see notes:[3])
- Glossaries - (e.g. Severe weather terminology (United States), Glossary of architecture, Glossary of chess, Glossary of beekeeping) - (50 afds and see notes:[4])
- Timelines (including Years and its subcats) - (e.g. Timeline of chemistry, 1901, 1901 in literature, Timeline of the War on Terror) - (177 afds)
- Not including:
- Disambiguation pages. (Talkpage discussion suggests we might leave Disambiguation pages/All set index articles out of consideration, if possible[5])
Quantity: See Template talk:About Wikipedia#Contents type total
Examples
editThe page WP:Categories, lists, and navigation templates, and the diversity of people's brains, explains why there are so many.
- Complete "Navigational pages" example sets. Using the topics Japan, Anarchism, and Mathematics.
- Mathematics - covering ~24,000 articles, we have:
- Portal:Mathematics
- Book:Mathematics
- Template:Mathematics-footer - (main navbox)
- Category:Mathematics - Also, see the mainspace page, List of mathematics categories.
- In mainspace:
- Lists of mathematics topics - (This contains only lists. It is a "list of lists")
- Outline of mathematics - (started titled as "Mathematics basic topics" in 2001; was briefly titled "Outline of mathematics")
- Index of mathematics articles - (an alphabetical index; updated by Mathbot; originally and currently titled "List of mathematics articles")
- List of mathematical jargon - (glossary, 1 of the 23 in Category:Glossaries on mathematics)
- Areas of mathematics - (aka "Branches of mathematics")
- Possibly also related is List of academic disciplines#Mathematics
Possible solutions
editEach of these previously-suggested solution could be applied to just some, or all, of the page-types:
- Visually tag navigational pages ("them"), and leave them in mainspace (treat them like we do disambiguation, and give them their own clear scope):
- Tag navigational pages with a new magic word such as __NOTCONTENT__,[6] and/or with some sort of banner (eg {{Outline header}}, or something similar to {{disambig}} and {{Saved book}}), in order to visually differentiate them from normal articles. Then just leave them where they are in mainspace.
- Move "them" to a new namespace
- something like [Navigation:...] or [Index:...] or [Contents:...] or [?:...]
- Move "them" to portalspace (Portal:...) – see problems:[7]
- Move "them" to bookspace (Book:...) – see problems:[8]
- Move "them" to projectspace (Wikipedia:...), as WikiProject subpages. – see problems:[9]
- Delete "them" all. (and variants of this suggestion, eg "move them off-wiki") – see problems:[10]
- ...?
Notes
edit- ^ Many of the subcategories of Category:Lists include items that belong in one of these 2. E.g. Lists of people contains many "indexes" and "lists of lists"
- ^ Some of the Outlines might belong in the "Partially" section, as they are often sourcable, eg outline of geography -wikipedia - Google Search. -- Outlines will be specifically addressed in a separate RfC, currently being discussed at User talk:Karanacs/Outline RfC draft
- ^ There is a page linking to just old threads, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of Knowledge/List of discussions concerning outlines, that lists the last 4 years worth of discussions, but is missing the last 10 months worth of heavy discussion.
- ^ I left a list of previous "Get rid of all glossaries, move them to Wiktionary, we don't want them" threads at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Glossaries#Old threads
- ^ See User talk:Karanacs/Outline RfC draft#Purpose
- ^ Comment/idea copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 54#Disambiguation pages are not articles: "An issue here is that while redirects have a clear technical meaning in all wikis, the concept of "non-content" article space pages (such as disambiguation page, index pages, list pages, or other things) currently has no clear definition in the database. Instead it is a purely content based distinction created by local contributors. This means that as one moves from one wiki to another, one may encounter different expectations about what should count as a "content" page. A label like #DISAMBIG might make sense here, but it wouldn't make sense on site not using disambigs. A more general label like __NOTCONTENT__ might makes sense. Developers generally would like solutions to be broad enough to work for all Mediawiki wikis. For the sake of argument, suppose we were to create a NOTCONTENT flag, are there uses for this other than the article count? Dragons flight (talk) 10:10, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
- ^ Portal: Problems with this solution (applicable to any page-type) are detailed at User:Karanacs/Outline RfC draft#Inclusion of outlines in Portalspace:- this would make them impossible to search for, this would conflict with current portal format standards, etc
- ^ Book: These pages would comprise my perfect Book, on each topic – An outline makes a perfect Table of Contents; A glossary and an index can belong within a complete book's scope; Related lists belong in a book's appendix – However, this size of structure doesn't seem to fit within WP:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books's mission and mandate. It seems to be far outside the size limits for books to have, for example, a list Outline of buddhism as a book's TOC. I left notes at Book talk:Canada#Size estimate, detailing how large that would be. Now we can compare the information there, to how large a "book" created by something like Outline of Canada would be. [Note: Someone asked a related question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books#What should be "booked"? but it hasn't been answered yet.] Perhaps that could be the defining scope-limit for outlines, for moving forward? "The topic needs to have a larger scope than WP:WPBOOKS can handle." or similar. That would clear out items which are Wikipedia-Book sized.
- ^ Project: this would make them almost inaccessible to readers, per WP:SELF and unsearchability
- ^ Deletion: I would humbly suggest that there is a significant level of support for all these page types, and that decisions that are broadly destructive, are not likely to meet significant consensus.
- Previous new-namespace proposals
- Wikipedia talk:What is an article?#Moved from Talk:Main Page - see especially: "A Wikipedia article can be defined as a page in the database that either has encyclopedic or almanac-like information on it ("almanac-like" being; lists, timelines or charts)." (2002)
- Wikipedia talk:Wikiportal/Archive 1#Survey of opinion on a separate namespace for portals and lists (2005)
- Wikipedia talk:Featured content/Archive 1#Featured project (Apr 2006) - brief mention by Shyam, then proposed at Wikipedia talk:Featured lists/Archive 1#List Namespace 2 and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#List Namespace (Oct 2006) - thread archived at User:Shyam/List Namespace (2006)
- Wikipedia talk:Community Portal/Archive 10#Create a List Namespace (Jun 2006)
- Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 14#Index lists (Nov 2007)
- Wikipedia:Move navigational lists to portal namespace (Jan–Mar 2008)
- Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 29#List_or_annex_namespace (Jun 2008)
- Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 34#Namespace_for_lists (Sep 2008)
- Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 36#New namespace... "list" and "list_talk" (Oct 2008)
- Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Suggestion (call it point 2.1): Moving purely navigational lists out of article space (Aug 2010)