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Portal:Contents

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Explore Wikipedia's Contents

There are a couple of ways to look things up in Wikipedia: by searching or by browsing.

  • If you know the name of an article for which you are looking, simply type it into Wikipedia's search box.
  • If you would like to look around the encyclopedia to see what is on it, use Wikipedia's Contents pages. Lists and indices are examples of contents for a published work, and Wikipedia has many of each, including a complete alphabetical index and indices by category.
    Links to all of Wikipedia's main contents pages are presented below, and they in turn link to the more specific pages.

Curated article collections

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.

  • Portal: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.

Third-party classification systems

Various third-party classification systems have been mapped to Wikipedia articles, which can be accessed from these pages:

Vital articles

Vital articles are lists of subjects for which Wikipedia should have corresponding high-quality articles. They serve as centralized watchlists to track the status of Wikipedia's most important articles.

Reference collections

Wikipedia has several types of pages which provide content in a non-prose form, for reference purposes.

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:

Timelines

Timelines list events chronologically, sometimes including links to articles with more detail. There are several ways to find timelines:

Of particular interest may be:

Glossaries

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

Bibliographies

Bibliographies list sources on a given topic, for verification or further reading outside Wikipedia:

Category:Discographies

Discographies catalog the sound recordings of individual artists or groups.

Special format collections

Portals

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

Spoken articles

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

Collections of articles

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:

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.

Alphabetical lists of articles

Wikipedia's alphabetical article indexes

Collections of articles by quality or popularity

Featured content

Featured content is the best Wikipedia has to offer, via vigorous peer review. Presented by type:

Most popular articles