User:Quiddity/Navigational pages RfC

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 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) - (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)) - (22 afds)
 * 4) *many other Lists
 * 5) Partially:
 * 6) *Outlines - (e.g., "Outline of Japan", "Outline of law", "Outline of mathematics", etc.) (10 + 20 AfDs, and see notes: )
 * 7) *Glossaries - (e.g. Severe weather terminology (United States), Glossary of architecture, Glossary of chess, Glossary of beekeeping) - (50 afds and see notes: )
 * 8) *Timelines (including Years and its subcats) - (e.g. Timeline of chemistry, 1901, 1901 in literature, Timeline of the War on Terror) - (177 afds)
 * 9) Not including:
 * 10) *Disambiguation pages. (Talkpage discussion suggests we might leave Disambiguation pages/All set index articles out of consideration, if possible )

Quantity: See Template talk:About Wikipedia

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.
 * Japan - covering ~24,000 articles, we have:
 * Portal:Japan
 * Book:Japan
 * Template:Japan topics
 * Category:Japan (and Category:Japan-related lists)
 * In mainspace:
 * Outline of Japan
 * Index of Japan-related articles
 * Glossary of Japanese history


 * Anarchism - covering ~850 articles, we have:
 * Portal:Anarchism
 * Template:Anarchism sidebar
 * Template:Anarchism
 * Category:Anarchism
 * In mainspace:
 * Outline of anarchism
 * Glossary of anarchism
 * Lists of anarchism topics


 * 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

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):
 * Tag navigational pages with a new magic word such as __NOTCONTENT__, 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.
 * 1) Move "them" to a new namespace
 * something like [Navigation:...] or [Index:...] or [Contents:...] or [?:...]
 * 1) Move "them" to portalspace (Portal:...) – see problems:
 * 2) Move "them" to bookspace (Book:...) – see problems:
 * 3) Move "them" to projectspace (Wikipedia:...), as WikiProject subpages. – see problems:
 * 4) Delete "them" all. (and variants of this suggestion, eg "move them off-wiki") – see problems: