This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's rough notes page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. |
This (RfC draft from 2010) mainly concerns 4 page types. Indexes, Lists of lists, BasicTopicOutlines, and Glossaries. These types are individually fretted over for related concerns – scope, notability, page-structure, minimum quality-level, namespace, existence, naming convention, etc – on a perennial schedule. It is difficult for many of these to meet Featured List criteria.
The root list, Portal:Contents, was named/located at [Wikipedia:Category schemes] from 2001-2006. (eg Nov 2005 sample diff). It's been linked from the Main Page almost constantly since creation, and from the MediaWiki:Sidebar since March 2007.
Some of these page-types are purely listings of articles that Wikipedia has, grouped by topic (and structure) - eg Lists of people and List of statistics articles - Hence they would not satisfy general notability as "articles".
All the page types have been around for years, but work over the last few years to cleanup/improve/expand/coordinate some of them (particularly outlines, glossaries, and indexes) has led to disagreements with a few editors, leading to much discussion in dozens of locations.
Quantity: See Template talk:About Wikipedia#Contents type total
The page WP:Categories, lists, and navigation templates, and the diversity of people's brains, explains why there are so many.
Each of these previously-suggested solution could be applied to just some, or all, of the page-types: