Main subject classifications

Wikipedia's main navigation subsystems

(overviews, outlines, lists, portals, glossaries, categories, and indices) are each divided into the
following subject classifications:

 Culture – encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as
well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities and habits of the
individuals in these groups.
 Geography – field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants,
and phenomena of the Earth and planets.
 Health – state of physical, mental and social well-being.
 History – the past as it is described in written documents, and the study thereof.
 Human activities – the various activities done by people. For instance, it includes
leisure, entertainment, industry, recreation, war, and exercise.
 Mathematics – the study of topics such as quantity (numbers), structure, space, and
change. It evolved through the use of abstraction and logical reasoning, from
counting, calculation, measurement, and the systematic study of the shapes and
motions of physical objects.
 Natural science – branch of science concerned with the description, prediction, and
understanding of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation
and experimentation.
 People – plurality of persons considered as a whole, as is the case with an ethnic
group or nation.
 Philosophy – study of general and fundamental questions about existence,
knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.
 Reference works – compendiums of information, usually of a specific type, compiled
in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly
found when needed.
 Religions – social-cultural systems of designated behaviors and practices, morals,
worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates
humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements.
 Society – group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large
social group sharing the same geographical or social territory, typically subject to the
same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are
characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who
share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the
sum/total of such relationships among its constituent of members.
 Technology – the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the
production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as
scientific investigation.

Curated article collections

Overview articles
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.

 Wikipedia:Contents/Overviews lists overview articles from covered fields in a single

page.
Outline pages
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.

 Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines is a comprehensive list of "Outline of __" pages,

organized by subject. It is itself an outline, that links (almost) exclusively to other
outlines.
 Outline of academic disciplines covers subjects studied in college or university and
provides links to prose overview articles and their corresponding outlines.
 Outline of knowledge is the top-level outline, its subject being the broadest one of all.
It is the ancestor of all other outlines, and they branch out from it, in successive
levels.
List of articles every Wikipedia should have
Main article: meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have
These articles are considered the foundation that every Wikipedia should build upon.

 meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have - 1,000 most important articles
 meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have/Expanded - 10,000 most important
articles
Vital articles
Main page: Wikipedia:Vital articles
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.

 Vital articles level 1 – 10 most important articles

 Vital articles level 2 – 100 most important articles
 Vital articles level 3 – 1,000 most important articles
 Vital articles level 4 – 10,000 most important articles
 Vital articles level 5 – 50,000 most important articles

Third-party classification systems

Various third-party classification systems have been mapped to Wikipedia articles, which can be
accessed from these pages:

 Library of Congress Classification

 List of Dewey Decimal classes
 Figurative system of human knowledge (Encyclopédie)
 Propædia (Encyclopædia Britannica)
 Tree of knowledge system
 Universal Decimal Classification