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User:Quiddity/Navigational pages RfC

{{Userspace notes}}

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

  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

The root list, Portal:Contents, was named/located at [Wikipedia:Category schemes] from 2001-2006. (eg [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Contents&oldid=28016646 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"=

  1. Purely:
  2. *Lists of lists - (e.g. Lists of people, Lists of mathematics topics, List of decades, Lists of hospitals) - ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&redirs=1&advanced=1&search=intitle%3ALists+of++prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&limit=250&offset=0 101 AfDs])
  3. *Indexes of topics - (e.g. Index of psychology articles, Index of fishing articles, List of mathematics articles (updated daily by User:Mathbot)) - ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&redirs=1&advanced=1&search=intitle%3AIndex+of++prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&limit=50&offset=0 22 afds])
  4. *many other ListsMany 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"
  5. Partially:
  6. *Outlines - (e.g., "Outline of Japan", "Outline of law", "Outline of mathematics", etc.)Some of the Outlines might belong in the "Partially" section, as they are often sourcable, eg [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=outline+of+geography+-wikipedia&aq=f&aql=&aqi=&oq= 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 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&redirs=1&advanced=1&search=intitle%3Abasic+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&limit=100&offset=0 10] + [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1&search=intitle%3Aoutline+prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&title=Special%3ASearch&advanced=1&fulltext=Advanced+search 20 AfDs], and see notes: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.)
  7. *Glossaries - (e.g. Severe weather terminology (United States), Glossary of architecture, Glossary of chess, Glossary of beekeeping) - ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&redirs=1&advanced=1&search=intitle%3AGlossary++prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&limit=100&offset=0 50 afds] and see notes: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)
  8. *Timelines (including Years and its subcats) - (e.g. Timeline of chemistry, 1901, 1901 in literature, Timeline of the War on Terror) - ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&ns4=1&ns10=1&redirs=1&advanced=1&search=intitle%3ATimeline++prefix%3AWikipedia%3AArticles+for+deletion&limit=500&offset=0 177 afds])
  9. Not including:
  10. *Disambiguation pages. (Talkpage discussion suggests we might leave Disambiguation pages/All set index articles out of consideration, if possibleSee User talk:Karanacs/Outline RfC draft#Purpose)

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

Examples

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.

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Possible solutions

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):
  2. :Tag navigational pages with a new magic word such as __NOTCONTENT__,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) and/or with some sort of banner (eg {{tl|Outline header}}, or something similar to {{tl|disambig}} and {{tl|Saved book}}), in order to visually differentiate them from normal articles. Then just leave them where they are in mainspace.
  3. Move "them" to a new namespace
  4. :something like [Navigation:...] or [Index:...] or [Contents:...] or [?:...]
  5. Move "them" to portalspace (Portal:...) – see problems: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
  6. Move "them" to bookspace (Book:...) – see problems: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.
  7. Move "them" to projectspace (Wikipedia:...), as WikiProject subpages. – see problems:Project: this would make them almost inaccessible to readers, per WP:SELF and unsearchability
  8. Delete "them" all. (and variants of this suggestion, eg "move them off-wiki") – see problems: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.
  9. ...?

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Notes

;Previous new-namespace proposals