Wikipedia

User:Quiddity/Navigational pages RfC

< User:Quiddity

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

  1. Is "Navigational pages" a good way to group these various types? What better ways are there to describe or group them?
  2. What requirements do they need to meet? (Beyond having a clear scope, and being useful to readers)
  3. 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 edit

The 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

  1. Purely:
  2. Partially:
  3. Not including:

Quantity: See Template talk:About Wikipedia#Contents type total

Examples edit

The 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.

Possible solutions edit

Each of these previously-suggested solution could be applied to just some, or all, of the page-types:

  1. 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.
  2. Move "them" to a new namespace
    something like [Navigation:...] or [Index:...] or [Contents:...] or [?:...]
  3. Move "them" to portalspace (Portal:...) – see problems:[7]
  4. Move "them" to bookspace (Book:...) – see problems:[8]
  5. Move "them" to projectspace (Wikipedia:...), as WikiProject subpages. – see problems:[9]
  6. Delete "them" all. (and variants of this suggestion, eg "move them off-wiki") – see problems:[10]
  7. ...?

Notes edit

  1. ^ 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"
  2. ^ 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
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ 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
  5. ^ See User talk:Karanacs/Outline RfC draft#Purpose
  6. ^ 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)
  7. ^ 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
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Project: this would make them almost inaccessible to readers, per WP:SELF and unsearchability
  10. ^ 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
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