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Contents and megaportals[edit]

This request for a portal peer review is a part of The portal namespace improvement drive: Contents and megaportals. Additional discussions about this are at Portal talk:Contents, including one specifically about megaportals – comprehensive portals that cover the landscape on high-level topics like those listed on the Main Page.

The focus of this portal peer review is to pose a few questions about the improvement drive in general and how it best can lead to featured portal status for the related portal pages in particular. Each set of questions will be accompanied by a related chart to help focus the issues. Please reply to each bulleted question directly below it. Feel free to add additional questions as well. RichardF (talk) 08:20, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Scope[edit]

The following chart represents the four key namespaces related to this improvement drive. Portals are the doorways to the encyclopedia's articles. The categories form the network of how pages are tied together; and the Wikipedia namespace provides the project's workspace. The scope of the improvement drive will consider anything that is or consensually should be in portal namespace as fair game.

{{Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/KeyNamespaces}}

  • What general types of pages should and should not be included in portal namespace? What pages need to be moved?
    • <add replies here>

Main topics classification systems[edit]

The following chart lists the main topics used in a number of high-level article classification systems. Although they have much in common, they also have some differences that often make it difficult for readers and editors to find what they want.br dkwkxmrmfkkrkdkdkk$dr,f,fedkdkdkdlxldlldkfk

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The following chart organizes the above main topics TOC systems by the group of Fundamental categories. It demonstrates the twelve current topical sections for Contents subpage TOCs can be used to organize all main TOC topics. It also highlights thththhh5thtbtfdv kLgrinlñeiejvroiuwfeglñ

  • Based on established article classification systems, what main contents topics should be used for TOC section headings?

sdcdscjbk** First, I have to say I believe that overall, the twelve-topics approach for the Zkjlsdlfjbfddfsshvjsefnmdscklbjhvsdvsdafvdfssjhvknñfbdhvjdwafewdvslhvjlkjfsegiufrñklevkjdsbkhlrvelmñkjgjhvwefkjljhkwefbkbsdkfbldrjkjkljtrkknbgfm,dank,fab,mnfdvbm, vv# ,can,objetn.I.jjfjvdx.jlntdbsñkijhgfjhgjfklhkfbjhfbgjjJnContents subpages TOCs is the best one out there. However, to better represent the complete set of TOC topics, some headings should be modified. Here's my first shot at what I would do differently. Jjfbeskfdmbhg Cab*** Change "Health and fitness" to "Health and medicine." "Fitness" is a minor redirect page to Physical fitness, while Category:Medicine is a strong member of Category:Health sciences, making the topic dx *ghdgeg 3 535 &355363663536636636536353552heading much more representative.bf

RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In answer to your suggestions above...

  • "Fitness" is a synonym for physical fitness, and as the short form it works well in the title. Also, it is much less ambiguous a term than "medicine" and is something a person has much more direct control over. That is, it's more directly relevant to the reader. "Health and health care" would fit better than "Health and medicine", but health already implies health care (if a person is looking for health care, they'll naturally click on "Health"), and medicine is almost synonymous with "health care" already. So "fitness" gives more bang for the buck. And as a component of health, it's the most critical factor I could find.
  • Rather than "Mathematics and measurement" how about "Formal science and mathematics"? Math is the main formal science, and the formal sciences is a whole branch of science that isn't covered in this TOC scheme yet (while the 3 other branches are). And it would match the structure of the rest of the section titles (where the second term is a major component of the first).
  • "People and self" works better than "personal life" because "self" is the broader of the two terms and because "personal life" is so vague. I've never even seen that before encountering it here on Wikipedia. "People and you" works better still, but goes against the manual of style. "People" implies others, and "self" means the reader, and so between those the subject includes everybody.  :) The structure of the titles is that the second terms is a key component of the first, and "self" is a person while "personal life" isn't.
  • "Philosophy and thinking" is good, since the noun "thought" sort of detracts from the nature of the thing as an activity. "Thinking" captures that much better, I think.  :)
  • Reference was on there and at the top of the page because the whole point of Wikipedia is as a reference tool for finding information, which makes other reference tools highly relevant to this purpose. So while they are part of library and information science, they are central to the whole reason a person comes to Wikipedia in the first place and therefore should probably be given easiest access. Another reason it was at the top was because of its general nature - references cover all the other subjects on the page and isn't really like the rest as it covers them all. On the other hand, sports and games are a subcat of entertainment, which falls firmly under culture.
  • Since "society" is the dominant term (the social sciences serve society and not the other way around), I agree that "Society and social sciences" is the more appropriate section heading.
The Transhumanist 02:11, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]


As I was tweaking the section headings, I noticed that:

  • "Religions and belief systems" is backwards. Religions are a subclassification of belief systems, and so in order to match the format of the other section titles, it should be "Belief systems and religions".
The Transhumanist 08:57, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Contents and megaportals pages[edit]

The following chart shows basic similarities and differences between the contents & portal page designs. The pages links indicate the current offerings for contents pages and potential megaportals. These two dozen or so pages ultimately would be put up as featured portal candidates as part of this portal namespace improvement drive.

  • What should be included as the collection of megaportals?
    • I listed what I believe to be the best matches to my recommended section headings in the general comments chart below. RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Navigation schemes[edit]

The following chart shows which templates and subpages are used to help navigate these related sets of pages. While relatively complete and consistent, such things always have room for improvement.

Portal talk:Contents/Navigation

  • How can the navigational templates and subpages, within and among Portal:Contents and its subpages, Portal:Contents/Portals and its megaportals, plus related pages be more effective?
    • A fundamental weakness in the current portal namespace navigation scheme is the lack of any direct way to move from any Portal:Contents page or "regular" portal page to any other of these pages in one or two clicks. The strongest way to remedy this would be to combine the links in Template:Contents pages (header bar) with those in Template:Browsebar. Another, weaker, way to do this is at the "linking/crossover" page, Portal:Contents/Portals. This is the one page both navbars have in common. It forces a reader to go to that page, instead of any page either one is on now, but it's better than nothing. It's the same concept as a key record to match up tables in a relational database management system. An example of that is here. Any "problems" by having a multi-line navbar are greatly outweighed by the benefits to readers and editors from having a simple and comprehensive method of navigating the doorways to Wikipedia, IMHO. RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • Right now, a nine-links version of Template:Browsebar is used, even though the Portal:Contents subpages have 12 sections. All 12 links should be included in the browsebar. A non-wrapping 800X600 screen resolution example of that using my recommended headers is here. RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • What navigation scheme should be used for the Main Page?
    • The strongest approach would be to include links to 12 featured megaportals that represent the primary topics in each of the portal contents sections. A (non-horizontal scrolling at 800X600 screen resolution) example of how that could look is here. A weaker approach would be to limit the number of Main Page links to nine, as it currently stands. An example of that is here. RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

General comments[edit]

I put my basic recommendations together in a chart to help me better see how they are related to each other.

RichardF (talk) 16:01, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

General comment about Portal-Contents

In general, looks nice from a quick look, and I'll look at all this in more detail later. I was just thinking that it would be neat to structure Portal:Contents more like other featured portals, and put things in four square boxes, as opposed to a long list that is left-aligned. Cirt (talk) 18:20, 26 December 2007 (UTC).[reply]

I knew you were going to say something like that! ;-) Maybe we could play around with a little "Nature – Society – Thought" layout. Have these Fundamental sections at 100% width, then place their "subsections" in columns below each of them. Of course, we don't necessarily have links to go into all three "fundamental" top sections for each Contents subpage, so we probably would have to customize each layout a bit. RichardF (talk) 20:43, 26 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A very quick and dirty mock-up of a Nature-Society-Thought two-column layout is here. I think it has promise, but I would like to see more support for it before I polish up a usable test layout. :-) RichardF (talk) 02:17, 27 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm very happy to see RichardF's chart; uniformity is essential for a user-friendly experience. I was drawn into the discussion by noticing that some pages use "Arts and culture", others use "Culture and the arts", and the main page just uses "Arts" to point to the "Arts" subdivision of the Culture / Arts hierarchy. It shouldn't be necessary to reinvent the wheel here; schemes for classification of knowledge abound, from the Dewey Decimal System to the Encyclopedia Brittanica's Outline of Knowledge, which has a ten-part organization and was carefully developed by a large team of experts. Wdfarmer (talk) 05:15, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the Propaedia and Dewey systems could be added to the list in Portal talk:Contents/TopicSystems?
That wouldn't seem right to me; that list contains systems that have already been implemented in Wikipedia et al. Wdfarmer (talk) 23:21, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Altogether, I'm still hoping there is someone better qualified than us, to make an informed/decisive judgment on where we're headed. I suggest asking for input from the folks at the pages mentioned, like WP:WP1 and WP:FA (if you havent already).
I'm done trying to solicit participation in this. If you want them to get involved, go for it. RichardF (talk) 23:41, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
"Culture and the arts" works for me, in the meantime. -- Quiddity (talk) 22:19, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. Since "culture" is the parent subject under which "the arts" are included, culture should come first. "Culture and the arts" matches the format of the section titles used on the contents pages. The Transhumanist 00:15, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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