Wikipedia:Indexes

This is an information page.

It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Wikipedia indexes (or indices) are alphabetical list articles, consisting of lists of, in turn, the encyclopedic articles available on Wikipedia for any broad, general topic. Examples include: Index of Buddhism-related articles, Index of fishing articles, and Index of physics articles. These are distinct from Wikipedia outlines, which are topically hierarchical instead of alphabetical.

There are three typical ways of accessing Wikipedia indexes:

from in-article links to them;
from Category:Wikipedia indexes, the category hierarchy where these specialized list articles are stored;
from Wikipedia:Contents/Indices, the page presenting these articles as a set.

Anyone may create or work on an index article. WikiProject Indexes is a WikiProject that has been organized to develop and maintain these pages.

Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates, for the distinction between list articles (of various sorts) and other forms of content navigation in Wikipedia
Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing, for the other kind of indexing
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Glossaries, for similar lists (often embedded) that are alphabetical lists of terms with encyclopedic definitions (for dictionary-style definitions, see Wiktionary)
Wikipedia:Outlines and Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines, for similar lists that are topically hierarchical instead of alphabetical
Wikipedia:Set index articles, list articles about a set of items of a specific type that also share the same (or similar) name. Similar to a WP:Disambiguation page but with actual content instead of just listing pages with the content.
Wikipedia:Timelines, for similar lists that are arranged chronologically (and are often embedded lists)

See also