Wikipedia:Selection pages

There are various selection pages that are used, along with article pages, in the Wikipedia article namespace.

There are 8 major types of Wikipedia selection pages:

  • category pages – These are pages named with prefix "Category:..." that connect articles or other categories or pages into groups, often below 100 entries but many exceeding 10,000 articles.
  • disambiguation pages – These are pages that provide a listing of alternative titles that use the same wording, or some of the same words, in the title. Pages are tagged by {{disambig}}.
  • redirection pages – These are pages that provide an alternative title (or subtitle) for an article or some other page; they can also link to the inside of pages, and have category links (which also activate during editing when concealing the "#REDIRECT" on line 1).
  • surname pages – These are pages that provide a listing of various biographical articles that use the same surname (or family name) in the title. Pages are tagged by {{surname}}.
  • list pages – These are pages that present a formal list of titles for a specific topic; the list is sometimes presented in the form a rigidly formatted table, rather than a free-format list of titles.
  • table pages – These are pages that present a formalized set of titles in a wikitable, with specific columns defined for the page. Some people refer to table-pages as list-pages, but having a tabular structure. Some tables are sortable by the various columns.
  • navpages – A navpage is a page containing a complete navbox as a stand-alone page, rather than only being transcluded into an article. Because a navpage contains a full-page navbox, it could be larger than a typical navbox, and contain more article titles as wikilinks.
  • crosslink pages – These pages provide a listing of titles that are related to a specific topic, but do not present a formalized list, and do not require all the linked article titles to contain the same words, as in a disambiguation page. The effect is a "navbox meets a disambiguation page" where the page is not limited to a box-style format and the linked titles do not contain exactly the same words within them. A crosslink page can contain multiple sets of any article titles related to a specific topic. It is neither a single list, nor a boxified navpage, nor a disambiguation page restricted to same-word titles. Many crosslink pages exist as "invalid" disambiguation pages, in a frustrated effort to link other related articles, images, or other pages that do not match the same-word titles. Crosslink pages can be regarded as linking pages with the same ideas, rather than the same words.

Those are the major types of Wikipedia selection pages.