Portal:Contents

Contents Overview Outlines Lists Featured Portals Glossaries Categories Indices

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Explore Wikipedia's Contents

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Below are content navigation systems to help you browse the encyclopedia. They serve as an alternative to the search box, and are especially useful when you don't know exactly what you are looking for, or for when you want to see everything on a particular subject.

Topic lists

Presenting article links, list articles provide the function of tables of contents.

Overviews

Overview—main articles of various topics
Outlines—subject summaries, as follows:
1. Ease of discovery—outlines show which topics belong to a subject and why
2. Subject structure—outlines show topic relationships (what belongs to what)
List of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines—subjects studied in college or university
Classification systems providing an outline or overview of knowledge:
- List of Dewey Decimal classes—top two levels of this library classification system, linked to Wikipedia articles
- Library of Congress Classification—LCC subjects linked to Wikipedia articles
- Outline of Roget's Thesaurus—articles organised into a system based on six classes, with thousands of branches, following Roget's system

Item lists

Lists—List of lists of related items (things)
Two of the broadest item list collections are:
- Lists of countries and territories and many lists by country
- Lists of people including by nationality and by occupation

Timelines

Timelines—list articles chronologically.
- List of centuries
- List of decades
- List of historical anniversaries—e.g. events on January 1 of any year
- 2015—major events this year
- Portal:Current events—featured current events and related project activities
- Deaths in 2015—lists notable people who died this year
- Category:Graphical timelines—graphical timelines in the category and subcategories, arranged alphabetically

Lists of articles by quality or popularity

Alternate formats

Portals

A portal introduces the reader to a subject by presenting images, categories and excerpts of key articles. Portals also guide editing by providing to-do lists.

Portals · Category:Portals

Wikipedia books

Wikipedia books are collections of Wikipedia articles that can be viewed, downloaded, or printed into a book. They provide a roadmap for a course of study in a particular subject.

Category:Wikipedia books (community books)—an alphabetical list of the books
Category:Wikipedia books—a list of the books, categorized by topic

Spoken articles

Growing collections of Wikipedia articles are starting to become available as spoken word recordings as well.

Category:Spoken articles—an organized list of all spoken articles
Wikipedia:Spoken articles—some general information about the spoken article technology

Glossaries

Glossaries are lists of terms with definitions. Wikipedia includes hundreds of alphabetical glossaries.

Glossaries · Category:Glossaries

Wikipedia's index systems

Category system

Wikipedia's collection of category pages is a classified index system. It is automatically generated from category tags at the bottoms of articles and most other pages. Nearly all of the articles available so far on the website can be found through these subject indexes.

If you are simply looking to browse articles by topic, there are three top-level pages to choose from:

Category:Main topic classifications—probably what you are looking for: Arts, History, Technology, etc.
Category:Fundamental categories—organizes articles into 'abstract' ontological categories in a way that every article can reasonably be expected to be classified within it; and
Portal:Contents/Categories—a hand-crafted list of first- and second-level topic categories.

For biographies, see Category:People categories by parameter.

Category:Contents is technically at the top of the category hierarchy, but contains many categories useful to editors but not readers. Special:Categories lists every category alphabetically.

Alphabetical lists of articles

Wikipedia's alphabetical article indexes

Special:Allpages lists all of the current pages in Wikipedia.
Portal:Contents/A–Z index provides an easy way to skip to a particular part of the alphabet in the list of all articles.
Lists of alphabetical indexes
- Category:Indexes of topics—alphabetical list of topic indexes
- Portal:Contents/Indexes—indexes sorted by topic area

Content listings

Types

Topics

Places, people and times

Indices

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