Wikipedia arranged by topic/Talk

I just had an interesting idea for an alternate category scheme. Right now, the main page has things organized by discipline. Now, a discipline is an area of study, and since humans study most everything, it makes sense that a list of disciplines would result in a list of starting-pages to most everything.

But we could, in addition (in an alternative "official category scheme" have the names of things themselves listed--of course, the most general of them. So, rather than Astronomy, we'd have space or [the universe]? or something like that. Rather than Philosophy, we would have being, goodness, knowledge, and a number of other basic topics studied by philosophy. Etc.

One interesting consideration about this idea is that, as in the case of philosophy, very many (perhaps all) disciplines cannot really be regarded as the study of just one thing--i.e., probably, for no discipline there is no one general category, C, such that the subject studied by that discipline is accurate and exhaustively described as 'the study of C'. Therefore, Wikipedia arranged by topic would have to include many more entry points than the present HomePage does, in order to be (more or less directly) connected to the same material that the top-level discipline articles connect to.

This consideration was inspired in part by an article Nupedia's Zoology editor wrote about Zoology. I replied that it seemed to be a really wonderful article about animals, and that we ought to rename the article "Animal." She agreed. A different article, about the study of animals, will be written about Zoology. This then raised the question as to what the top-level article should be for Nupedia: "Animal" or "Zoology"?

Of course, the issue arises here on Wikipedia as well.

--Larry Sanger