Contents and megaportals

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

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))

Main topics classification systems

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

6354725465374536737646546bilin$@&$ 

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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

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...

The Transhumanist 02:11, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]


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

The Transhumanist 08:57, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Contents and megaportals pages

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.

Navigation schemes

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

General comments

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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