Enable users to explore France on Wikipedia!
Information is only useful if you can find it. This department has the important duty of making sure users can find what they need to know about France, by showing what Wikipedia has on the subject. This entails developing and maintaining navigation pages displaying links to France-related articles, in collaboration with the WikiProjects that oversee these types of pages.
There are two ways to find material on France: with the search box, or by browsing. The user can only type into the search box what he already knows. And scanning through an article's text to find links that are placed there in a seemingly random order is both tedious and time-consuming. But Wikipedia has many other ways to explore a subject to see what the encyclopedia covers about it, including navigation aids optimized for browsing:
- Outline of France (see WP:WPOOK) - summarizes the subject as a tree structure, showing what relates to what. Serves as a table of contents or site map of France-related material on Wikipedia. May also be used as a study itinerary to learn about France in-depth. It is a branch of Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge. Top priority!
- Indexes
- Index of France-related articles (see WP:WPINDEX) - alphabetical index, which may also serve as a watchlist. (See also Category:Indexes of articles by country). (As of 07-01-2009, this page does not yet exist!). High priority
- Category:France - categorical index (see WP:CATP)
- List of French words and phrases used by English speakers - vocabulary index
- Glossaries (see WP:WPGLOSS)
- Portal:France - presents selections of excerpts similar to a Reader's Digest.
- France-related navigation templates - boxes of links placed for convenience
Without the above navigation aids, a user is forced to use hit/miss hunts via search, or read through prose to find links embedded in the text. This department is intended to make finding information related to France easy, convenient, and enjoyable.