User talk:EdJohnston/Lists in Wikipedia

What's the story on list articles?
It may happen that someone is in the middle of a debate, and wants to tell somebody what the policy is on lists in Wikipedia. It could be that the person will then wander disconsolate through a serious of documents that seem to contradict each other. So let's begin to collect some data, and look at the offered examples.

Starting from a Google search for 'wikipedia list' we follow links to try to find examples of articles in Wikipedia that begin 'List of...' Also take a look at List guideline, Lists in Wikipedia, and Featured_lists. The criteria for featured lists are in What is a featured list?

Now move on to my own reflections: Independent of any WP policy, here I include lists that seem interesting to me or a good use of my time to read. Notice in what follows that some of the lists I like are in the form of a table. There is a criticism of tables expressed in List guideline:
 * Although the use of tables to display lists is discouraged (because it introduces unnecessarily complex code and makes editing difficult), there are some instances where they can be useful, such as when three columns and more are required. See How to use tables

Examples of gorgeous lists
Here we are starting through Featured lists looking at everything.
 * List of Anuran families This article starts out with about four paragraphs of text (9/10 of a screen), followed by the list in the form of a five-column table. At the right end of each row is a picture. The text at the beginning is useful and motivates what follows.

In What is a featured list? we are told that such a list ".. is useful, comprehensive, factually accurate, stable, uncontroversial and well-constructed".

Lists that seem good
The first two examples come from List guideline.

This includes a lot of breeds I've never heard of, and most of them have articles. The above two are 'bare' lists where there is no squib or summary of what's in the corresponding article. If such a list were offered on a web site we might criticize it for failing to tell the reader what they will get if they click on the link. Since the reader knows what the list is a list *of* that may make it less important.
 * List of dog breeds
 * List of scholastic philosophers

<...TO BE CONTINUED...>