WP Topics

English Wikipedia organises topics in various ways

Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates

"Wikipedia offers several ways to group articles: categories, list articles (including item lists, as well as topical glossary, index, outline, and timeline articles), other lists including embedded lists, and navigation templates (of which article series boxes are one type). The grouping of articles by one method neither requires nor forbids the use of the other methods for the same informational grouping. Instead, each method of organizing information has its own advantages and disadvantages, and is applied for the most part independently of the other methods following the guidelines and standards that have evolved on Wikipedia for each of these systems."

Wikipedia Contents

Overview articles - summaries of broad topics with links to subtopics, biographies, and related articles.

Outline pages - topics in outline format, linking to more detailed articles.

List pages - enumerations of specific types, such as lists of countries and people

Portals - Access featured articles, images, news, and more through thematic portals.

Glossaries - Access lists of terms with definitions through alphabetical glossaries.
Projects

Categorization

Wikipedia's category pages - an uncontrolled vocabulary for articles by subject.

Category: Main topic classifications – Arts, History, Technology, and more
Wikipedia: Contents/Categories – Hand-crafted list of topic categories

Contents

Reference
Culture, Geography, Health, History, Human activities, Mathematics, Nature, People, Philosophy, Religion, Society, Technology

Vital articles

The vital articles on Wikipedia comprise a carefully curated selection of the most important topics. They are organized into five levels, each containing varying numbers of articles: Level 1 (10 articles) - Level 2 (100 articles) - Level 3 (1,000 articles) - Level 4 (10,000 articles) - Level 5 (50,000 articles). For background see the Vital articles FAQ

For Wikipedia's internal directory, see Wikipedia:Directories and indexes.

Wikidata taxonomies

ORES - now deprecated

Understanding topics on Wikipedia

"The main limitation with all of the above is that there is no central classification system that covers all Wikipedia pages, and that at the same time it is concise and easy to manage, particularly in terms of the number of subjects and the hierarchical relationships among them. The lack of such central classification in Wikipedia is a major hindrance for the large-scale epistemic study of Wikipedia." (Arroyo-Machado et al., 2022)

Arroyo-Machado et al., (2022) provide a good summary of how topics are organised and finding groups of content on WP

Wikipedia pages are not thematically organized according to a controlled language-based classification, such as Britannica’s subject organization system. Instead, Wikipedia pages have a category system that works like a folksonomy (Minguillón, Lerga et al., 2017). Wikipedians are free to tag each page under one or more existing categories or to create new ones. Numerous studies have approached them, such as by studying their semantic domain (Aghaebrahimian, Stauder, & Ustaszewski, 2020; Heist & Paulheim, 2019). However, the main problem of this folksonomy is the large number of individual categories and their unstructured (i.e., without a clear hierarchical system) relations at different levels, introducing a lot of noise and making it difficult to have a general thematic view of Wikipedia (Boldi & Monti, 2016; Kittur, Chi, & Suh, 2009). In addition, there are also hidden categories, related to the maintenance or management of the page.

Besides the categories, Wikipedia has other options for accessing and browsing its contents by topics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contents). On the one hand, it offers different curated content lists (e.g., the “list of articles every Wikipedia should have” or the list of “vital articles”). There are other lists that offer collections of articles that respond to the same topic, and even “lists of lists.” Similarly, there are “portals,” which imitate the classic web portals and are organized in sections that group the main contents of a topic, not only the articles (e.g., the “Science” portal or the “History of science” subportal). WikiProjects, communities of Wikipedians aimed at improving Wikipedia content on a specific topic and which have their own page from which they coordinate their activities, can also work as a classification approach due to their thematic orientation (e.g., “Anthropology” or “The Beatles”). There are also third-party classification systems, such as the “Library of Congress Classification” or the “Universal Decimal Classification.” Finally, external to Wikipedia, but within the Wikimedia ecosystem, there are other types of classification solutions, such as Wikidata taxonomies (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Taxonomy) or ORES (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES), that can be used to identify Wikipedia topics using machine learning techniques. The main limitation with all of the above is that there is no central classification system that covers all Wikipedia pages, and that at the same time it is concise and easy to manage, particularly in terms of the number of subjects and the hierarchical relationships among them. The lack of such central classification in Wikipedia is a major hindrance for the large-scale epistemic study of Wikipedia.

Arroyo-Machado, W, Torres-Salinas, D, Costas, R 2022, Wikinformetrics: Construction and description of an open Wikipedia knowledge graph data set for informetric purposes. Quantitative Science Studies, 3 (4): 931–952. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00226

Wikipedia Public Policy Related Projects

Wikipedia Projects bring interested editors together to discuss and work on a topic.

There is no Wikipedia public policy project on English WP but here are various projects that are relevant to the area.

List of Wiki projects with at least 30 page watchers (around 1000)

25. Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics (499 Watchers)

39. Wikipedia:WikiProject Law (408)

46. Wikipedia:WikiProject Higher education (371)

78. Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics (297)

103. Wikipedia:WikiProject Science (260)

149. Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change (203)

161. Wikipedia:WikiProject Environment (196)

165 Wikipedia:WikiProject Human rights (193)

171. Wikipedia:WikiProject International relations (188)

198. Wikipedia:WikiProject Education (168)

233. Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy (154)

442. Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy (89)

818. Wikipedia:WikiProject Drug Policy (45)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Science Policy (22)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Democracy (15)

Wikimedia related projects
Wikipedia:WikiProject Policy and Guidelines
WikiProject Policy and Guidelines is here to actively improve our policy and guideline pages.

Wikicite

Public policy topic pages

Top level page links from the naviagation template in public policy page

Agricultural policy
Climate change policy (Politics of Global Warming)
Cultural policy
Domestic policy
Drug policy
Economic policy
Education policy
Energy policy
Environmental policy
Food policy
Foreign policy
Health policy
Housing policy
Immigration policy
Knowledge policy
Language policy
Military policy
Science policy
Social policy

Public policy by country

Petscan

Search tool based on categories

Canned results for Policy OR Public policy (Union)

Negative: Countries, Living People, Organizations

With Wikidata links if available

= 10379 results

https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=25972859

Pagepile

Tool for managing piles (collections/lists) of pages from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other projects form the WikiVerse.

Retrieving raw category information[edit]

Raw information about the members of a category, their sortkeys and timestamps (time when last added to the category) can be obtained from the API, using a query of the form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?cmtitle=Category:Category_name&action=query&list=categorymembers&cmlimit=500&cmprop=title|sortkey|timestamp

Listings of up to 500 members are possible. If there are more members then the results will include text near the end like this: <categorymembers cmcontinue="page|NNNN|TITLE" />.

This can be added to the previous one, without quotation marks, for the next page of members: ...&cmcontinue=page|NNNN|TITLE

Portals

Politics portal

Visualising Wikipedia Topics

Generating Knowledge Graphs with Wikipedia: A Python Guide to Quickly Generate Knowledge Graphs

In this article, the authors describe a process to generate new knowledge graphs by leveraging the largest publicly available graph that deals with human knowledge: Wikipedia. We will fully automate the generation process with Python, allowing us to create a scalable approach to generating knowledge graphs for any field of interest. Follow along, the end-to-end notebook is available here in Google Colab.

This code has been adapted for public policy as a topic - see the image above.

Wikipedia - Github Python library

Wikipedia is a Python library that makes it easy to access and parse data from Wikipedia. Wikipedia Quick start

Main Topic Classifications

Main topic classifications‎ (41 C)
Main topic articles‎ (39 P)
Academic disciplines‎ (35 C, 50 P)
Business‎ (38 C, 20 P)
Communication‎ (12 C, 146 P)
Concepts‎ (10 C, 6 P)
Culture‎ (49 C, 89 P)
Economy‎ (21 C, 1 P)
Education‎ (54 C, 16 P)
Energy‎ (34 C, 39 P)
Engineering‎ (22 C, 24 P)
Entertainment‎ (50 C, 49 P)
Entities‎ (8 C, 1 P)
Ethics‎ (16 C, 10 P)
Food and drink‎ (44 C, 12 P)
Geography‎ (32 C, 53 P)
Government‎ (72 C, 45 P)
Health‎ (44 C, 23 P)
History‎ (26 C, 22 P)
Human behavior‎ (39 C, 101 P)
Humanities‎ (40 C, 39 P)
Information‎ (28 C, 41 P)
Internet‎ (27 C, 18 P)
Knowledge‎ (9 C, 53 P)
Language‎ (34 C, 58 P)
Law‎ (41 C, 33 P)
Life‎ (17 C, 7 P)
Lists‎ (35 C, 5 P)
Mass media‎ (47 C, 57 P)
Mathematics‎ (26 C, 7 P)
Military‎ (41 C, 15 P)
Nature‎ (22 C, 24 P)
People‎ (34 C, 2 P)
Philosophy‎ (15 C, 2 P)
Politics‎ (44 C, 85 P)
Religion‎ (39 C, 25 P)
Science‎ (37 C, 3 P)
Society‎ (52 C, 24 P)
Sports‎ (51 C, 4 P)
Technology‎ (37 C, 21 P)
Time‎ (46 C, 56 P)
Universe‎ (5 C, 2 P)

Wikidata

Wikidata currently contains over 100 million Items and over 650,000 Lexemes, and these numbers will keep on growing. There are many methods available to access all that data - see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access

Advantages of a category

WP:AOAC

Auto-linking. Create a link to a category on an article page, and a corresponding link to that article will be visible on the category page.
Multi-directional navigation. A category can contain multiple subcategories, and can also be part of several categories. Categories are organized within Wikipedia into a web of knowledge starting with Category:Wikipedia categories.
Good for exploratory browsing of Wikipedia.
Less susceptible to external linkspam than other types of pages, because only Wikipedia articles can be members of categories.
Relatively unobtrusive in that they generally don't distract from the flow of the article.
Search can use the incategory parameter to exclude or include all pages in that category. Subcategories are not included, but multiple terms can be added.

Disadvantages of a category

WP:DOAC

Can't be edited directly to add or remove entries. This must be done at the bottom of each article to be included or excluded from the category.
Categories only list the name of a page. And individual category members cannot be annotated with descriptions or comments, so they give no context or elaboration for any specific entry.
There is no provision for referencing any specific entry, to verify a topic meets a category's criteria of inclusion.
Entries are arranged in alphabetical order only (though you can control the alphabetization). They cannot be organized into sections and subsections on a single page, each with its own descriptive introduction.
Can be difficult to maintain:
1. A category with hundreds of items cannot be moved except by editing hundreds of articles (though a bot can help)
2. Tracking changes to a category is difficult because a category's edit history does not show when entries were added or removed from the category. So there is no easy way to tell when an article is removed from a category—it simply disappears with no indication that it was ever there in the first place. Wikipedia's watchlist feature does enable a user to watch a category for category membership changes.
Does not support other forms of tracking, such as adding red links. (Red links are useful as gap indicators and as task reminders to create those articles.) However stubs can be added to categories.
Alternative names for the same item can be included only by including redirects in the category.
It is not obvious to new users that categories exist, how to add items to them, how to link new categories into existing schemes, nor how to deal with point of view (POV) concerns.
Categories are not shown in mobile view.
Display of items in a category is limited to 200 on a page. To see the full contents of a category with more members than this, multiple pages need to be viewed.

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