User:Teratornis/Index/About

Content in general

The index will eventually list links to many human-edited pages on RationalWiki. RationalWiki users will maintain this page manually. The plan is for the index to contain page titles, and all the synonyms and keywords any user deems useful for looking up content. That is, if a user expects a certain page to be under a certain topic heading in the index, generally that user can add the page there. The index may well link to a given page from more than one place, like a real index. However, because this is not a paper index, it does not have to work exactly the same way.

Ideally, the index should be a handy way both to browse for content, and search (with Ctrl-f in a Web browser).

If the RationalWiki community agrees, this page will eventually move to something like [[Project:Index]], and the community will take over manually editing it.

Information sources

All the information to build the index already exists elsewhere on RationalWiki, in various forms on various pages. RationalWiki users who maintain the index must check these sources periodically for new information.

• Special pages
  • Special:Allpages - useful for seeing alphabetic lists of all pages in the various namespaces
  • Special:Newpages
• [[:Category:Categories]] (this will work after I implement category browsing on RationalWiki)
  • Special:Categories
• [[:Category:Navigation templates]] - we can transclude some or all of these directly into the index (again, this will be after I implement navigation templates on RationalWiki, assuming there aren't already some)

To-do: document the remaining information sources we use while building and updating the index.

Formatting conventions

Asterisks and spaces

When formatting entries, follow this convention (note the spaces):

* Topic:
**[[Page name]]
** Subtopic
***[[Page name]]

The space just before a topic or subtopic name is very useful when editing - it provides a visual cue to help editors distinguish headings from entries when viewing the wikitext for the index. The space is not visible to a user who merely reads (rather than edits) the index.

Anchors

Many topics have a span id at the end of the line with that topic; for example:

<span id="perl"></span>

• The shorter form should work, but may not work on RationalWiki (check this):
<span id="perl"/>

Using span id allows us to link to a specific place in the index.

For id values, we use the shortest string that makes sense.

Piped links

Do not use piped links for entries in the index, because showing the full wikilink adds descriptive value, and creates more targets for Ctrl-f keyword search in a user's Web browser. In some cases, this requires somewhat duplicate text, such as:

Conservation: wp:Wikipedia:Conservation status

• To-do: replace the above Wikipedia example with an example relevant to RationalWiki.

Shortcuts

To-do: document the shortcut links for citing entries in the index compactly.

Using the index

RationalWiki users manually edit the index to provide another entry point into RationalWiki content, in addition to native MediaWiki site navigation features such as: categories, links, and special pages. The intent is to make the index the most comprehensive guide on one page to RationalWiki content, and also to organize information topically in ways that the other methods do not.

• You can navigate through the index in the straightforward way, by following the alphabetic links, and cross-reference links.
• Ctrl-f search in a Web browser lets you search the index for keywords. This is often useful because the keyword you have in mind may not be the initial word of a heading where you expect it to appear; many useful search keywords appear only in page titles, or in subheadings under some other heading. Having such an extensive list of page titles on one page makes the index a target-rich environment for keyword search.
• Many subject headings in the index have links to several related pages. This is a helpful way to find pages that relate to a page you already know, or to a useful page you just found. The ease of starting new pages on a wiki leads to some proliferation of similar pages; the index helps to unite all the content about a particular subject, saving you time when you are trying to find a page about a particular aspect of something.

See also

To-do: list any related pages on RationalWiki.

External links

• wp:User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia (shortcut: wp:WP:EIW) - the page which inspired our index
  • wp:User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia/About - the analog of this instruction page on Wikipedia