Explore Wikipedia's contents
Wikipedia is a compendium of the world's knowledge. If you know what you are looking for, type it into Wikipedia's search box. If, however, you need a bird's eye view of what Wikipedia has to offer, see its main contents pages below, which in turn list more specific pages.
Featured content represents the best of Wikipedia, and has undergone a thorough review process to ensure that it meets the highest encyclopedic standards. Presented by type:
Wikipedia's main navigation subsystems (overviews, outlines, lists, portals, glossaries, categories, and indices) are each divided into the following subject classifications:
Vital articles are lists of subjects for which the English Wikipedia should have corresponding high-quality articles. They serve as centralized watchlists to track the quality status of Wikipedia's most important articles and to give editors guidance on which articles to prioritize for improvement.
Overview articles summarize in prose a broad topic like biology, and also have illustrations and links to subtopics like cell biology, biographies like Carl Linnaeus, and other related articles like Human Genome Project.
Outline pages have trees of topics in an outline format, which in turn are linked to further outlines and articles providing more detail. Outlines show how important subtopics relate to each other based on how they are arranged in the tree, and they are useful as a more condensed, non-prose alternative to overview articles.
These articles are considered the foundation that every Wikipedia should build upon.
Various third-party classification systems have been mapped to Wikipedia articles, which can be accessed from these pages:
Wikipedia has several types of pages which provide content in a non-prose form, for reference purposes.
List pages enumerate items of a particular type, such as the List of sovereign states or List of South Africans. Wikipedia has "lists of lists" when there are too many items to fit on a single page, when the items can be sorted in different ways, or as a way of navigating lists on a topic (for example Lists of countries and territories or Lists of people). There are several ways to find lists:
Timelines list events chronologically, sometimes including links to articles with more detail. There are several ways to find timelines:
Of particular interest may be:
Glossaries are lists of terms with definitions. Wikipedia includes hundreds of alphabetical glossaries; they can be found two ways:
Bibliographies list sources on a given topic, for verification or further reading outside Wikipedia:
Discographies catalog the sound recordings of individual artists or groups.
Portals contain featured articles and images, news, categories, excerpts of key articles, links to related portals, and to-do lists for editors. There are two ways to find portals:
Growing collections of Wikipedia articles are starting to become available as spoken word recordings as well.
Wikipedia's collection of category pages is a classified index system. It is automatically generated from category tags at the bottoms of articles and most other pages. Nearly all of the articles available so far on the website can be found through these subject indexes.
If you are simply looking to browse articles by topic, there are two top-level pages to choose from:
For biographies, see Category:People.
Category:Contents is technically at the top of the category hierarchy, but contains many categories useful to editors but not readers. Special:Categories lists every category alphabetically.
Wikipedia's alphabetical article indexes
You can help us keep Wikipedia up to date! The list below is for encyclopedia entries that describe and pertain to events happening on a current basis.
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