Wikipedia:Lists

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"WP:LIST" redirects here; for Wikipedia's mailing lists, see Wikipedia:Mailing lists; for the WikiProject, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists; and for technical information on how to format lists, see Help:List.
✔ This page documents an English Wikipedia style guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.
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This page in a nutshell:
  • Lists and categories are synergistic — the benefits of their redundancy are covered in WP:CLS.
  • Lists may be embedded in articles or may be stand alone articles
  • Lists should have a self-explanatory title, and a lead-in description with further explanation as required.
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Lists are commonly used in Wikipedia to organize information. Lists may be found within the body of a prosaic article, or as a stand-alone article. This guideline explains when and how to use lists appropriately.

Contents

[edit] Types of lists

A list can stand alone as a self contained page, or it can be embedded in an article.

  • Stand-alone lists are articles consisting of a lead section followed by a list. The items on these lists include (but are only rarely exclusively) links to articles in a particular subject area, such as people or places, or a timeline of events. The titles of these articles should always begin with List of or Timeline of or Glossary of. The title and bullet style or vertical style is common for this type of list. These Wikipedia articles follow the Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists) style guideline. Subtypes of stand-alone lists include:
    • A Glossary page presents definitions for specialized terms in a subject area. Glossaries contain a small working vocabulary and definitions for important or frequently encountered concepts, usually including idioms or metaphors useful in a subject area.
    • A Bibliography page presents a list of relevant books, journal or other references for a subject area. Bibliographies are useful for expanding Further Reading topics for Summary style articles.
    • A Discography page presents a listing of all recordings which a musician or singer features. Additionally, discographies may be compiled based on a particular musical genre or record label, etc.
    • Set index articles document a set of items that share the same (or a similar) name. They are different from disambiguation pages in that they are fully-fledged articles meant to document multiple subjects, while disambiguation pages are for navigation purposes only.
    • Dynamic lists change as the subjects they cover change, and may never be completed.
  • Embedded lists are either included in the article or appended to the end of articles. They present information or aid in navigation to related articles. Some examples include: See also lists, Compare lists, Related topics lists, Reference lists, and lists of links under the heading External links. To see how to include a list in an article, go to Wikipedia:Lists (embedded lists)

[edit] Purposes of lists

See also: Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigational templates

Redundancy between lists and categories is beneficial because they are synergistic, and is covered in the guideline Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigational templates. Like categories, lists can be used for keeping track of changes in the listed pages, using the Related Changes feature. Unlike a category, a list also allows detection of deletion of pages from it, and, more generally, a history of its contents is available.

Lists have three main purposes:

[edit] Information

The list may be a valuable information source. This is particularly the case for a structured list. Examples would include lists organized chronologically, grouped by theme, or annotated lists.

[edit] Navigation

Lists contain internally linked terms and thus in aggregate serve as natural tables of contents and indexes of Wikipedia. If users have some general idea of what they are looking for but do not know the specific terminology, they could browse the lists of basic topics and more comprehensive lists of topics, which in turn lead to most if not all of Wikipedia's lists, which in turn lead to related articles. Users without a specific research goal in mind might also find the articles listed in articles' see also sections useful. Lists are also provided in portals to assist in navigating their subjects, and lists are often placed in articles via the use of series boxes and other navigational templates.

Users with a specific research goal, described by one or two words that they can spell correctly, are likely to find Wikipedia's search box useful.

[edit] Development

Some lists are useful for Wikipedia development purposes. The lists of related topics give an indication of the state of Wikipedia, the articles that have been written, and the articles that have yet to be written. However, as Wikipedia is optimized for readers over editors, any lists which exist primarily for development or maintenance purposes (such as a list of red link articles needed) should be in project or user space not the main space, if the list is not otherwise encyclopedic.

[edit] List naming

For a stand-alone list the list's title is the page name. For an embedded list, the list's title is usually a section title (for instance Latin Empire#Latin Emperors of Constantinople, 1204–1261), but it can be shorter, see for example Streamlined style or horizontal style below.

A list's title should be as clear and unambiguous as possible, as it reports the contents of the list. But sometimes this is not possible, as when the name of the subject is itself misleading or ambiguous. In such a case, the lead section should remedy this problem (see below).

For a navigational template used as an embedded list (often called "series box", see for example {{IsaacNewtonSegments}}, {{Princess Royal}},...):

  • Make the title section stand out with an appropriate background color (see {{Navbox}}).
  • Make the title link to the "main" or summary style article of the series.

[edit] List content

[edit] Lead section or paragraph

The contents of an article that is a stand-alone list should be obvious. If the title does not already clarify what the list includes, then the list's lead section should do so. Don't leave readers confused over the list's inclusion criteria or have editors guessing what may be added to the list.

However short or schematic a list description, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view applies, including:

It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one.

Lead sections and paragraphs should also not go counter the recommendations of the Self-references to avoid guideline.

[edit] Lead sections in stand-alone lists

Stand-alone lists should always include a lead section just as other articles do. Even when the meaning of a list's title seems obvious, a lead section should be provided which briefly and clearly describes what the list is about. In other words, it should present the inclusion criteria items must meet in order to qualify to be added to the list. For example:

  • If the meaning of the list's title seems obvious, e.g. List of dog breeds, the article may open with a simple statement using wikilinks, e.g. "This is a list of dog breeds." (The inclusion criteria is that an item must be the name of a dog breed in order to be added to the list).
  • If the list's title does not seem obvious, e.g. List of scholastic philosophers, the lead section should clarify the meaning of the title, e.g. "This is a list of philosophers working in the Christian tradition in Western Europe during the medieval period. See also scholasticism."
Non-obvious characteristics of a list, for instance regarding the list's structure, should also be explained in its lead section.
Lists should not be used to create content forks between a topic that has a separate wikipedia article (e.g. "republic") and a list complementary to that topic (e.g. "List of republics").

Review Wikipedia:Lists (stand-alone lists) for further clarification. See also WP:NOT#DIR (Wikipedia is not a directory) for the suitability of material to make a list about in an encyclopedic context.

[edit] Lead paragraphs in embedded lists

Embedded lists should have a lead paragraph in cases where the title is ambiguous or when the list has non-obvious characteristics.

[edit] Organization

Although lists may be organized in different ways, they must always be organized. The most basic form of organization is alphabetical or numerical (such as List of minor Star Wars characters), though if items have specific dates a chronological format is sometimes preferable (List of Belarusian Prime Ministers). When using a more complex form of organization, (by origin, by use, by type, etc.), the criteria for categorization must be clear and consistent. Just as a reader or editor could easily assume that the headings A, B, C would be followed by D (rather than 1903), more complex systems should be just as explicit. If a list of Australians in international prisons contains the headings Argentina and Cambodia (organization by country), it would be inappropriate for an editor to add the heading Drug trafficking (organization by offense). If a list entry logically belongs in two or more categories (e.g., an Australian in an Argentine prison for drug trafficking), this suggests that the list categorization might be flawed, and should be re-examined.

Lists should never contain Unsorted or Miscellaneous headings, as all items worthy of inclusion in the list can be sorted by some criteria, although it is entirely possible that the formatting of the list would need to be revamped to include all appropriate items. Not-yet-sorted items may be included on the list's talk page while their categorization is determined.

[edit] Listed items

See also: WP:NOT#DIR

Lists, whether they are embedded lists or stand-alone lists, are encyclopedic content as are paragraphs and articles, and they are equally subject to Wikipedia's content policies such as Verifiability, No original research, Neutral point of view, and others.

Difficult or contentious subjects for which the definition of the topic itself is disputed should be discussed on the talk page in order to attain consensus and to ensure that each item to be included on the list is adequately referenced and that the page on which the list appears as a whole represents a neutral point of view.

The principle of Neutral Point of View requires that we describe competing views without endorsing any one in particular. Wikipedia:No original research applies equally to a list of like things as it does for the content article on each individual thing listed.

The verifiability policy states that if material is challenged or likely to be challenged, it is the responsibility of the editor who adds or restores the material to an article to cite sources for that material. Inclusion of material on a list should be based on what reliable sources say, not on what the editor interprets the source to be saying. In the case of edits lacking citations, according to Wikipedia:Verifiability:

Any edit lacking a reliable source may be removed, but editors may object if you remove material without giving them a chance to provide references. If you want to request a source for an unsourced statement, consider moving it to the talk page. Alternatively, you may tag a sentence by adding the {{fact}} template, a section with {{unreferencedsection}}, or the article with {{refimprove}} or {{unreferenced}}. Use the edit summary to give an explanation of your edit. You may also leave a note on the talk page or an invisible HTML comment on the article page.

However, in lists that involve living persons, the following from the Biographies of living persons policy applies:

Be very firm about the use of high quality references. Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material — whether negative, positive, or just questionable — about living persons should be removed immediately and without discussion from Wikipedia articles, talk pages, user pages, and project space.

[edit] Category

You can add a suitable subcategory of Category:Lists at the bottom of the page.

[edit] List styles

See also: Help:List

There are several ways of presenting lists on Wikipedia:

[edit] Bulleted lists

The format is:

== Title of list ==

* Example 1
* Example 2
* Example 3

[edit] Title of list
  • Example 1
  • Example 2
  • Example 3

As a matter of style, list items should start with a capital letter. They should not have a punctuation mark such as a period, a comma or a semi-colon at the end, except if a list item is one or more full sentences, in which case there is a period at the end.

This style is appropriate for long lists, or lists of entries which consist of both a link and explanatory text. Also, it is appropriate when the article already has several titles and/or subtitles.

The Title provides a direct edit point, if one enables section editing. It also enables the automatic table of contents system to detect the list. It is not required, however.

Many Wikipedians feel this style is the easiest to read.

[edit] Numbered lists

Similar to the above, use a # symbol to obtain a numbered list. The format is (note that to ensure sequential numbering, list items must not be separated by empty lines):

== Title of list ==

# Example 1
# Example 2
# Example 3

[edit] Title of list
  1. Example 1
  2. Example 2
  3. Example 3

[edit] Streamlined style or horizontal style

The format is:

''Title of list:'' example 1, example 2, example 3

Title of list: example 1, example 2, example 3

The style requires less space on the page, and is preferred if there are only a few entries in the list, it can be read easily, and a direct edit point is not required. The list items should start with a lowercase letter unless they are proper nouns.

[edit] Definition lists

The format is:

; Term 1 : Definition 1
; Term 2 : Definition 2
; Term 3 : Definition 3
Term 1 
Definition 1
Term 2 
Definition 2
Term 3 
Definition 3

Use these real definition lists instead of fake ones like

* Term — Definition
  • Term — Definition

or

* '''Term''': Definition
  • Term: Definition

In many cases tables are better suited than definition lists.

[edit] Tables

Although the use of tables to display lists is discouraged (because it introduces unnecessarily complex code and makes editing difficult), there are some instances where they can be useful, such as when three columns and more are required. See Wikipedia:When to use tables

[edit] Boilerplate text

Before or after an incomplete list, insert the following text which will be automatically substituted:

{{expand list}}

which produces:

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] See also


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