Wikipedia:Contents

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Wikipedia serves as a comprehensive repository of global knowledge. If you have a specific topic in mind, simply enter it into Wikipedia's search box. Alternatively, if you require an overview of Wikipedia's vast offerings, explore the main contents pages listed below, which further direct you to more specific articles..

Navigating Wikipedia's subjects

Wikipedia organizes its main content into distinct subject classifications, each with further subdivisions.

Culture

Culture – Encompasses the social norms, behaviors, arts, beliefs, laws, customs, and habits of human societies, along with the knowledge of individuals within these groups.

Geography

Geography – The scientific study of Earth's lands, features, inhabitants, and planetary phenomena.

Health

Health – The state of physical, mental, and social well-being.

History

History – The past as documented in written records and its scholarly exploration.

Timelines

Timelines present events chronologically, often with links to more detailed articles. To access timelines: Explore the List of timelines for a comprehensive single-page collection. Browse Category:Wikipedia timelines for a multi-page collection categorized by subject. Key timelines include:

Current history entries

Contribute to Wikipedia's currency! Below is a list of encyclopedia entries covering ongoing events.

Human activities

Human activities – Diverse actions undertaken by people, encompassing leisure, entertainment, industry, recreation, warfare, and exercise.

Mathematics and formal sciences

Mathematics – The study of quantity, structure, space, and change. It progresses through abstraction, logical reasoning, and the exploration of shapes and motion in physical objects.

Natural sciences

Natural science – The scientific branch focused on describing, predicting, and comprehending natural phenomena using empirical evidence from observations and experiments.

People

People – Groups of individuals viewed as a collective entity, such as ethnic groups or nations.

Philosophy

Philosophy – The exploration of fundamental questions concerning existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.

Reference works

Reference works – Comprehensive information collections compiled for easy access and quick retrieval when needed.

Third-party classification systems

Refer to various third-party classification systems linked to Wikipedia articles, accessible from these pages:

Bibliographies

Bibliographies provide sources on specific topics for external verification or further reading:

Religion

Religions – Social-cultural systems encompassing behaviors, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, ethics, and organizations connecting humanity to supernatural or spiritual elements.

Society and social sciences

Society – Collectives of individuals engaging in consistent social interaction within shared geographic or social territories, often governed by common political authority and cultural norms. Societies emerge from relationships among members, shaping their culture and institutions.

Technology and applied sciences

Technology – Techniques, skills, methods, and processes employed in producing goods, services, or achieving objectives, including scientific exploration.

Wikipedia's main contents systems

Overview articles

Overview articles summarize in prose a broad topic like biology, and also have illustrations and links to subtopics like cell biology, biographies like Carl Linnaeus, and other related articles like Human Genome Project.

Outline pages

Outline pages have trees of topics in an outline format, which in turn are linked to further outlines and articles providing more detail. Outlines show how important subtopics relate to each other based on how they are arranged in the tree, and they are useful as a more condensed, non-prose alternative to overview articles.

  • Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines is a comprehensive list of "Outline of __" pages, organized by subject. It is itself an outline, that links (almost) exclusively to other outlines.
  • Outline of academic disciplines covers subjects studied in college or university and provides links to prose overview articles and their corresponding outlines.
  • Outline of knowledge is the top-level outline, its subject being the broadest one of all. It is the ancestor of all other outlines, and they branch out from it, in successive levels.

List pages

List pages enumerate items of a particular type, such as the List of sovereign states or List of South Africans. Wikipedia has "lists of lists" when there are too many items to fit on a single page, when the items can be sorted in different ways, or as a way of navigating lists on a topic (for example Lists of countries and territories or Lists of people). There are several ways to find lists:

Portals

Portals contain featured articles and images, news, categories, excerpts of key articles, links to related portals, and to-do lists for editors. There are two ways to find portals:

Glossaries

Glossaries are lists of terms with definitions. Wikipedia includes hundreds of alphabetical glossaries; they can be found in two ways:

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 two top-level pages to choose from:

For biographies, see Category:People.

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.

Articles by importance or quality

Vital articles

Main page: Wikipedia:Vital articles

Vital articles are lists of subjects for which the English Wikipedia should have corresponding high-quality articles. They serve as centralized watchlists to track the quality status of Wikipedia's most important articles and to give editors guidance on which articles to prioritize for improvement.

Featured content

Featured content represents the best of Wikipedia, and has undergone a thorough review process to ensure that it meets the highest encyclopedic standards. Presented by type:

Good articles

Good articles are articles that meet a core set of editorial standards, the good article criteria, and successfully pass through the good article nomination process. They are well written, contain factually accurate and verifiable information, are broad in coverage, neutral in point of view, stable, and illustrated, where possible, by relevant images with suitable copyright licenses.

Spoken articles

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

Alphabetical lists of articles

Wikipedia's alphabetical article indexes

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