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Currently, there are several lists in the mainspace that primarily exist for purposes of navigation, cluttering up the mainspace needlessly. Meanwhile, there exists the Portal namespace, which is relatively little used, which is designed primarily for navigation. I'm suggesting moving navigational lists to portal namespace as subpages of current portals.
The idea came from the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Verifiability[1].This is not the first time it's been suggested - it was discussed at the village pump. There was also discussion of moving Lists of mathematics topics to the portal namespace before, but it was deemed "no consensus", then moved to the portal namespace, then deemed "no consensus" again and moved back. (Whether Lists of mathematics topics is a list whose sole purpose is navigation is disputed - see talk) I want to revisit this idea and try and get consensus for the change.
Examples of articles effected:
- List of mathematical articles (and related alphabetical pages) - moved to Portal:Mathematics/List of mathematical articles
- List of anatomical topics - moved to Portal:Medicine/List of anatomical topics
- List of aviation topics - moved to Portal:Aviation/List of avpiation topics
- List of biochemistry topics - moved to Portal:Chemistry/List of biochemistry topics
- List of biology topics - moved to Portal:Biology/List of biology topics
- List of chemistry topics - moved to Portal:Chemistry/List of chemistry topics
- List of conservation topics - moved to Portal:Environment/List of conservation topics
- List of ecology topics - moved to Portal:Ecology/list of ecology topics
- List of economics topics - moved to Portal:Business and economics/List of economics topics
- List of game topics - moved to Portal:Sports and games/List of game topics
- List of history topics - moved to Portal:History/List of history topics
- List of literature topics - moved to Portal:literature/List of literature topics
- List of musical topics - moved to Portal:Music/List of musical topics
- List of optical topics - moved to Portal:Physics/List of optical topics
- List of philosophical topics - moved to Portal:Philosophy/List of philosophical topics
- List of plate tectonics topics - moved to Portal:Geoscience/List of plate tectonics topics
- List of physics topics - moved to Portal:Physics/List of physics topics
- List of psychology topics - moved to Portal:Psychology/List of phychology topics
The advantages to this are:
- Portal-related
- Widens people's knowledge of the portal namespace
- Adds the "portal" link to the top of each of these pages, which improves reader's navigation
- Would encourage people to link to these lists from Portals if not done already.
- Tidies up Wikipedia's navigation
- Keeps articles within the mainspace and navigation away from it
- Solidifies the current hierarchy
- Won't artificially inflate the Wikipedia articles count
Disadvantages:
- Have to actually move the articles to the namespace - the number of articles is at least 600. By hand, or potentially use a bot spanning over categories?
- There may be a grey area for certain articles, and raises what to do with article lists that don't fall under any of the portals (Portal:Miscellaneous perhaps?)
- Potential issues with Wikipedia:Cross-namespace redirects - should the redirects be in place? If they aren't, would they make the lists harder to find?
- Bureaucracy-related, where people don't like articles being moved for whatever reason, or arguments on whether articles are primarily for navigation or not.