Wikipedia talk:Contents/Indices

Proposal to change a section title

There's a proposal to adjust one of the main section titles used in "Wikipedia's contents". See Portal talk:Contents#Proposal for main section title adjustment. The Transhumanist 10:15, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Delete indices?

Why indices exist if WP already has exhaustive categories and selective lists? Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 06:07, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

@Fgnievinksi: Wikipedia outline pages might also be considered redundant. Jarble (talk)

@Fgnievinski: I'd argue that since categories have subcategories it might become harder to navigate if one is looking to get an overview of the subject.★Trekker (talk) 13:25, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

@Fgnievinski and *Treker: Wikipedia has several navigation subsystems, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. And each with the potential through additional technology to leapfrog the others. Nobody can be sure of which approach will become dominant in the future, or how these subsystems may diversify, and so it is good to have multiple systems under development.

Indices are part of the list navigation system. "Regular lists" are item lists, each including members of a particular class of thing, while outlines and indices are general topic lists, including subtopics of the subject presented in their titles. The distinction is that List of sharks presents the class of things that are sharks, while Outline of sharks is about sharks, covering the entire subject (what they eat, whom they've eaten, etc.).

Many editors have asked "why have lists at all, when we have the category system?" There are many reasons, the best of which, in my opinion are:

1. Editors have different development styles, and turning down volunteered participation would be foolish. I prefer editing articles rather than tags at the bottom of articles. Lists are a type of article. What you see is what you edit.
2. The category system is not as intuitive to new editors. Clicking "edit" to edit what you see on a page is pretty straight forward. But if you try that with a category page, the editor doesn't see any of the topics in the category in the edit window. The editor has just discovered the Wikipedia learning curve.
3. Lists are centralized, while categories are decentralized. Therefore, lists provide direct and more control over their maintenance. You can look at a list's history to see what has disappeared from the page. With categories, you cannot.
4. Lists support a different style of browsing. Categories are chopped up into little subcategories, requiring much clicking to navigate an entire subject to move up and down all the branches of its disconnected tree -- it may be hard to keep track of what you've looked at and what you haven't. Lists, including indices, outlines, and timelines, gather many more topics onto a single page, allowing perusal more by scrolling rather than clicking. The encyclopedia should continue to accommodate different user learning and browsing styles. Some users prefer lists, while others prefer categories.

There are still more reasons, and many of them are covered in the guideline Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates (WP:CLN).

To explore Wikipedia's various navigation subsystems, see the top page of Wikipedia's overall navigation system: Portal:Contents.

I mentioned technology above. An approach currently being worked on are user scripts to enhance list viewing and to assist in list development. An example of a list-based navigation technology is Wikipedia's search feature. However, the format of its search results, while a list, is cluttered with much data beyond the topics themselves. With the use of SearchSuite, search results can be displayed with topics only, one topic per line — a pure list format. They can also be displayed with list wiki-formatting (* [[]], to provide ease of copying and pasting one or more list items into a wiki-editor to assist in building list articles. Eventually, programmers, including myself, will build tools specifically for viewing, building, and maintaining indices in convenient ways.

I hope the above explanation has been helpful to you.

Sincerely,     — The Transhumanist    20:46, 3 April 2018 (UTC)