User:Anand QED/organization

How is Wikipedia organized?

 * Primarily by Namespaces in the current wiki.
 * More importantly, by Categories, Portals and Projects.
 * Categories are very important in any wiki implementation.

Why do we need to know the structure of Wikipedia?

 * You don't need to know. You would be happier knowing just wiki markup and doing constructive work.
 * Articles are the main, but not the only things we find in wikipedia.
 * You need to be able to locate and assess an Article in the context of other articles in that topic. In fact, an Article's right to exist depends on this context.
 * The search features is insufficient - an editor or researcher should also be able to use the Categories to understand the coverage of the whole topic.
 * You just wish to browse by subject and don't have a specific keyword to search by.

Namespaces
Namespace is precisely how the wiki is organized. Each namespace also corresponds to practical things that you will need to interact with quite often. The wikipedia search by default will search only in the Article namespace.

Categories
"Categories are a MediaWiki feature that adds any page with the wikimarkup in its wikimarkup to the automated listings that are categories. Categories help readers to find, and navigate around, a subject area, to see pages sorted by title, and to thus find article relationships."

Documentation namespaces
Wikipedia and Help namespaces are purely for documentation.

Portals
There are Portals for each topic and there is a directory of Portals.

"All portals should be listed at the directory of portals: Portal/Directory, which also details their founding dates and whom you can contact with regard to a particular portal. If you have created a portal, you must list it here. Portal:Contents/Portals lists all portals of reader-ready quality."

Books
Not to be confused with Wikibooks.


 * Books
 * Bookshelf

Portal of Contents
One of the most impressive systems of organization can be found in the Portal of Contents which is really a scheme of categories. In brief:

Example of portals, categories and projects
With respect to mathematics, we have:


 * Category:Mathematics portals
 * Portal:Contents/Mathematics and logic

The maintainers of these portas is WikiProject Mathematics


 * WikiProject Council/Guide ... guide to wikiprojects
 * Vital_articles ...vital articles list
 * WikiProject Mathematics/Recognized content ...FA, GA, etc. articles
 * WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity ...newly created articles etc.
 * WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 ...assessment and classification of Mathematics articles.

Other organizational structures

 * Department directory