Explore Wikipedia's contents

Below are pages to help you select subjects to learn about.

Overviews

• Overview   —   main articles of various topics
• Outlines   —   subject summaries, as follows:
  1. Ease of discovery – outlines show which topics belong to a subject and why
  2. Access to articles – outlines serve as tables of contents of Wikipedia
• List of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines   —   subjects studied in college or university
• Classification systems providing an outline or overview of knowledge:
  • List of Dewey Decimal classes   —   top two levels of this library classification system, linked to Wikipedia articles
  • Library of Congress Classification   —   LCC subjects linked to Wikipedia articles
  • Outline of Roget's Thesaurus   —   articles organised into a system based on six classes, with thousands of branches, following Roget's system

Item lists

Lists of things.

• Lists   —   of things

Two of the broadest item list collections are:

• Lists of countries and territories and many lists by country
• Lists of people including by nationality and by occupation

Timelines

• Timelines   —   list articles chronologically.
  • List of centuries
  • List of decades
  • List of historical anniversaries   —   e.g. events on January 1 of any year
  • 2024   —   major events this year
  • Portal:Current events   —   featured current events and related project activities
  • Deaths in 2024   —   lists notable people who died this year
  • Category:Graphical timelines   —   graphical timelines in the category and subcategories, arranged alphabetically

Lists of articles by quality or popularity

Featured content

Featured content is the best Wikipedia has to offer, via vigorous peer review. Presented by type:

• Featured articles · Featured lists · Featured pictures · Featured portals · Featured sounds · Featured topics

Most popular articles

• Wikipedia:Top 5000 pages (of the last week)
• Wikitop   —   Top 30 most popular articles by categories, with user comments on traffic jumps

Portals

A portal introduces the reader to a subject by presenting images, categories and excerpts of key articles. Portals also guide editing by providing to-do lists.

• Portals · Category:Portals

Wikipedia books

Wikipedia books are collections of Wikipedia articles that can be viewed, downloaded, or printed into a book. They provide a roadmap for a course of study in a particular subject.

• Category:Wikipedia books (community books)   —   an alphabetical list of the books
• Category:Wikipedia books   —   a list of the books, categorized by topic

Spoken articles

Growing collections of Wikipedia articles are starting to become available as spoken word recordings as well.

• Category:Spoken articles   —   an organized list of all spoken articles
• Wikipedia:Spoken articles   —   some general information about the spoken article technology

Glossaries are lists of terms with definitions. Wikipedia includes hundreds of alphabetical glossaries.

• Glossaries · Category:Glossaries

Category system

Wikipedia's category system is generated from category tags at the bottoms of articles and most other pages. Nearly all of the articles available so far on the website can be found through this system.

If you are simply looking to browse articles by topic, there are three alternatives for the top-level list of topics:

• Category:Main topic classifications   —   probably what you are looking for: Arts, History, Technology, etc.
• Category:Fundamental categories   —   organizes articles into 'abstract' ontological categories in a way that every article can reasonably be expected to be classified within it; and
• Portal:Contents/Categories   —   a hand-crafted list of first- and second-level topic categories.

For biographies, see Category:People categories by parameter.

Category:Contents is technically at the top of the category hierarchy, but contains many categories useful to editors but not readers. Special:Categories lists every category alphabetically.

Alphabetical listing of articles

• Special:Allpages lists all of the current and avaliable pages in Wikipedia so far.
• Portal:Contents/A–Z index provides an easy way to skip to a particular part of the alphabet in the list of all articles. This is particularly useful for anyone who can't be bothered or just doesn't have the avaliable time to go searching through a long list of articles to find the specific one(s) they need.