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1Curated article collections

2Reference collections
3Special format collections
4Collections of articles
5Collections of articles by quality or popularity
There are two ways to look things up in Wikipedia: by searching or by browsing.

If you know the name of an article for which you are looking, simply type it into Wikipedia's search box.

If you would like to look around the encyclopedia to see what is on it, use Wikipedia's Contents pages. Lists
and indices are examples of contents for a published work, and Wikipedia has many of each, including
a complete alphabetical index and indices by category.
Links to all of Wikipedia's main contents pages are presented below, and they in turn link to the more specific
pages.

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.

Portal:Contents/Overviews lists overview articles from covered areas of knowledge in a single page.
Outline pages
Outline pages have trees of article links in an outline format. They show how important subtopics relate to each
other, and can be useful as a more condensed, non-prose alternative to overview articles.

Portal:Contents/Outlines is a comprehensive list of "Outline of __" pages, organized by subject

Outline of academic disciplines covers subjects studied in college or university, and links directly to prose
overview articles
Third-party classification systems
Various third-party classification systems have been mapped to Wikipedia articles, which can be accessed from
these pages:

List of Dewey Decimal classes

Library of Congress Classification
Wikipedia:Outline of Roget's Thesaurus
Vital articles
Main page: Wikipedia:Vital articles
Vital articles are lists of subjects for which Wikipedia should have corresponding high-quality articles. They serve
as centralized watchlists to track the status of Wikipedia's most important articles.

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

Reference collections
Wikipedia has several types of pages which provide content in a non-prose form, for reference purposes.

List pages
List pages enumerate items of a particular type, such as the List of sovereign states or List of South Africans.
Wikipedia has "lists of lists" when there are too many items to fit on a single page, when the items can sorted in
different ways, or as a way of navigating lists on a topic (for example Lists of countries and territories or Lists of
people). There are several ways to find lists:

Portal:Contents/Lists A limited single-page collection of lists and lists of lists

List of lists of lists A broad single-page collection of lists of lists
Category:Lists Browse lists comprehensively via the multi-page Wikipedia category system
Timelines
Timelines list events chronologically, sometimes including links to articles with more detail. There are several ways
to find timelines:

List of timelines has a long single-page collection

Category:Timelines has a comprehensive multi-page collection via the Wikipedia category system
Of particular interest may be:

List of centuries
List of decades
List of historical anniversariese.g. events on January 1 of any year
2017major events this year
Portal:Current eventsfeatured current events and related project activities
Deaths in 2017lists notable people who died this year
Category:Graphical timelinesgraphical timelines in the category and subcategories, arranged alphabetically
Glossaries
Glossaries are lists of terms with definitions. Wikipedia includes hundreds of alphabetical glossaries; they can be
found two ways:

Portal:Contents/Glossaries A single-page list of glossaries

Category:Wikipedia glossaries Browse glossaries comprehensively via the Wikipedia category system
Bibliographies
Bibliographies list sources on a given topic, for verification or further reading outside Wikipedia:

Category:Wikipedia bibliographies has a complete multi-page listing

Category:Discographies
Discographies catalog the sound recordings of individual artists or groups.

Category:Discographies has a complete multi-page listing

Special format collections

Portals
Portals include featured articles, images, news, categories, excerpts of key articles, links to related portals, and to-
do lists for editors. There are two ways to find portals:

Portal:Contents/Portals A single-page list of portals

Category:Portals Browse portals comprehensively via the Wikipedia category system
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 booksa 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 articlesan organized list of all spoken articles

Wikipedia:Spoken articlessome general information about the spoken article technology

Collections of articles
Category system
Wikipedia's collection of category pages is a classified index system. It is automatically 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 these subject indexes.
If you are simply looking to browse articles by topic, there are three top-level pages to choose from:

Category:Main topic classificationsprobably what you are looking for: Arts, History, Technology, etc.
Portal:Contents/Categoriesa hand-crafted list of first- and second-level topic categories
For biographies, see Category:People.
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 lists of articles

Wikipedia's alphabetical article indexes

Special:Allpages lists all of the current pages in Wikipedia.

Portal:Contents/AZ index provides an easy way to skip to a particular part of the alphabet in the list of all
articles.
Lists of alphabetical indexes
Category:Wikipedia indexesalphabetical list of topic indexes
Portal:Contents/Indicesindexes sorted by topic area

Collections 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 topics
Most popular articles

Wikipedia:Top 5000 pages (of the last week)