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User:Quiddity/Navigational pages RfC

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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

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  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

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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"

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

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

Examples

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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

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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

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  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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