Wikipedia

User:Anand QED/organization

< User:Anand QED

How is Wikipedia organized?

edit
  • Primarily by Namespaces in the current wiki.
  • More importantly, by Categories, Portals and Projects.
  • Categories are very important in any wiki implementation.

Why do we need to know the structure of Wikipedia?

edit
  • You don't need to know. You would be happier knowing just wiki markup and doing constructive work.
  • Articles are the main, but not the only things we find in wikipedia.
  • You need to be able to locate and assess an Article in the context of other articles in that topic. In fact, an Article's right to exist depends on this context.
  • The search features is insufficient - an editor or researcher should also be able to use the Categories to understand the coverage of the whole topic.
  • You just wish to browse by subject and don't have a specific keyword to search by.

Namespaces

edit

Namespace is precisely how the wiki is organized. Each namespace also corresponds to practical things that you will need to interact with quite often. The wikipedia search by default will search only in the Article namespace.

Wikipedia data structure
Namespaces
Subject namespaces Talk namespaces
0 (Main/Article) Talk 1
2 User User talk 3
4 Wikipedia Wikipedia talk 5
6 File File talk 7
8 MediaWiki MediaWiki talk 9
10 Template Template talk 11
12 Help Help talk 13
14 Category Category talk 15
100 Portal Portal talk 101
118 Draft Draft talk 119
126 MOS MOS talk 127
710 TimedText TimedText talk 711
828 Module Module talk 829
Former namespaces
108 Book Book talk 109
442 Course Course talk 443
444 Institution Institution talk 445
446 Education Program Education Program talk 447
2300 Gadget Gadget talk 2301
2302 Gadget definition Gadget definition talk 2303
2600 Topic 2601
Virtual namespaces
-1 Special
-2 Media
Current list

Categories

edit

"Categories are a MediaWiki feature that adds any page with the wikimarkup [[Category:pagename]] in its wikimarkup to the automated listings that are categories. Categories help readers to find, and navigate around, a subject area, to see pages sorted by title, and to thus find article relationships."

Documentation namespaces

edit

Wikipedia and Help namespaces are purely for documentation.

Portals

edit

There are Portals for each topic and there is a directory of Portals.

"All portals should be listed at the directory of portals: Wikipedia:Portal/Directory, which also details their founding dates and whom you can contact with regard to a particular portal. If you have created a portal, you must list it here. Portal:Contents/Portals lists all portals of reader-ready quality."

Books

edit

Not to be confused with Wikibooks.

Portal of Contents

edit

One of the most impressive systems of organization can be found in the Portal of Contents which is really a scheme of categories. In brief:

Example of portals, categories and projects

edit

With respect to mathematics, we have:

The maintainers of these portas is WikiProject Mathematics

Other organizational structures

edit
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anand_QED/organization&oldid=554866180"