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The purpose of this discussion page is to manage the Level 1 list of 10 topics for which Wikipedia should have high-quality articles (e.g. at WP:FA and WP:GA status). Since changes to this list affect lower-level lists, discussions regarding its composition are best initiated at Wikipedia talk:Vital articles.

All Level 1 nominations must be of an article already listed at level 2.

All proposals must remain open for !voting for a minimum of 15 days, after which:

1. After 15 days it may be closed as PASSED if there are (a) 5 or more supports, AND (b) at least two-thirds are in support.
2. After 30 days it may be closed as FAILED if there are (a) 3 or more opposes, AND (b) it failed to earn two-thirds support.
3. After 30 days it may be closed as NO CONSENSUS if the proposal hasn't received any !votes for +30 days, regardless of tally.
4. After 60 days it may be closed as NO CONSENSUS if the proposal has (a) less than 5 supports, AND (b) less than two-thirds support.

Nominations should be left open beyond the minimum if they have a reasonable chance of passing. An informed discussion with more editor participation produces an improved and more stable final list, so be patient with the process.

For reference, the following times apply for today:

• 15 days ago was: 08:10, 15 January 2025 (UTC) (Purge)
• 30 days ago was: 08:10, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
• 60 days ago was: 08:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Religion is an important aspect of all human societies. We already list Philosophy at this level so I think listing it alongside that article is sufficient. The article Human, which we already list, has a section that covers the key points of the human history article.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 15:34, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
2. I think Religion is a top 10 subject, Politics as well for that matter.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 16:16, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
3. Support. Human  1 is already level 1, so having Human history  1 feels redundant. I've felt that we could swap it for a long time, and religion does seem like a good answer. It is one of the unique things about humans and has had profoundly impacted us before recorded history even began. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

1. I think one history article should be on level 1. I'm fine with Human history, but if people are worried about redundancy, History would also be a good candidate. However, I'm not sure how strong the redundancy-argument is and in which direction it works. Looking at the sections of the article Human, there is redundancy with most of the other level 1 article. The overlap is also there with the article Religion, so I'm not sure that there is a significant improvement according to the overlap metric. Phlsph7 (talk) 18:27, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

   Comment: History, in its current form, may more aptly be named "Study of history", since it's more of a survey of fields and techniques rather than history itself (only the sections By period and By geographic location really fit that description). Compare to Human history, which is more directly informative. If there existed an article about "General history" written analogously to Human history I would agree with this. – Farkle Griffen (talk) 20:23, 13 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

2. Oppose, see below  Carlwev  07:21, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
3. Religion is roughly subsumed by Philosophy  1 on the ideas and theory side and by Human history  1 on the cultural/societal/historical impact side. On a side note, this is probably controversial but if we had to get rid of one VA1 article, my vote would be for Mathematics  1 which is a field of Science  1. I would consider replacing math with religion. Aurangzebra (talk) 21:11, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

   Mathematics is usually considered a separate field from science. It used by almost all disciplines to some degree, including accounting, science, medicine, and engineering. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:30, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

   Writing  2 and Communication  2 are tools that are used in even more disciplines than mathematics. We presumably don't list these because they are subsumed by other VA1 topics such as society, the arts, and technology. As for your first claim, every serious classification of science lists math as a science (see Branches of science and Outline of science). I don't particularly care to remove math. My take is just that there are 9 tier 1 topics that subsume everything else. On the second tier are things that have had vast sweeping implications on humans or the physical world but are at least partially subsumed by something in tier 1. These would be things like Mathematics  1, Religion  2, or Culture  2. I can see math being the most vital of these tier 2 topics and since we list 10 articles at VA1 and not 9, it makes sense to list it. I just argue that it is the least vital of the existing 10. Aurangzebra (talk) 01:20, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

   "Science" is used now as a synonym for doing research, but it is a very specific type of research. Math predates science and the scientific method. The page for Mathematics states "Mathematics is essential in the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, finance, computer science, and the social sciences. Although mathematics is extensively used for modeling phenomena, the fundamental truths of mathematics are independent of any scientific experimentation. Some areas of mathematics, such as statistics and game theory, are developed in close correlation with their applications and are often grouped under applied mathematics. Other areas are developed independently from any application (and are therefore called pure mathematics) but often later find practical applications." GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:53, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

4. Oppose Just from looking at the quotas for history vs. religion at lower levels, it seems pretty obvious that history is the more vital topic. Cobblet (talk) 04:00, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
5. Basically the same opinion as Aurangzebra. Kevinishere15 (talk) 22:10, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
6. Human history, or history of the world as it was previously known, is core to this list. I could support swapping religion in for philosophy. J947 ‡ ^edits 03:10, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
7. Oppose Religion is more like subtopic of history. --Thi (talk) 17:01, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discuss

Just thought I'd throw in some fun data for the discussion. If you look at the page views over the past five years here for the top ten articles, there some intersting stuff jumps out. First, the top three viewed pages are Earth, Human, and Philosophy, while the bottom three are human history, society, and the arts. Human history has 2,784,667 views during the five years, while religion has 5,313,463. If we added religion, it would be the sixth most viewed article between science and technology. Views aren't everything, but as it is one of the criteria, I thought I'd bring it into the discussion. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:56, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I bring up some of the same points I brought up in the section currently above, remove human history, add geography, and some new ones.

Religion goes well with Philosophy? - how is this different to religion is covered by philosophy and so not needed in a list of 10?

Human covers human history? History being, documenting the past means the article named "human history" is so named to distinguish it from other histories eg, history of Earth, life, universe, etc. There is no need to name religion "human religion" or arts "human arts" because it is redundant. This may give the impression human covers human history more than other topics. When in reality, the article on human has subsections dedicated to art, technology, religion, philosophy, science, society, as well as history. If removing human history is in part because it is mentioned in human, we need to discus why history over the other top ten articles mentioned in the human article, other than the word human being in the title.

Page views. Human history may a lower page view at 3 million since 2015 simply because it is clunkier and less likely to be typed in and searched for compared to simple "history" which has 10.1 m views. For comparison religion has 10.6 m views in the same period, not much more than history. Also life is lower at 7.1 m society has only 5.2 m and the Arts has only 3.4 m. Those last 2 are also covered in the human article. If we are only worried about page views, Art has 14.6 m views 4 times more compared with "the arts" at only 3.4, I believe the difference is mostly due to what terms people search at odds with the terms we deem "correct" or best for titles, why the arts was chosen over art, and human history vs history and Earth vs geography has been discussed before. Also articles like sun and moon have over 20 million views, which is higher than all the top 10 vital articles other than Earth, also Music is over 20 million views which is higher than 8 of the 10 vital articles, lower only than Earth and Human. So page views alone need to be considered with other reasons not in isolation.

[1]

How much history, religion and philosophy get further down the lists? In the 100 list history has 9 articles, compared to philosophy and religion together which has 6. In the 1000 list history has 85 articles philosophy and religion together have less at 57. The 10K list history has 694, philosophy and religion together have less at 433. The 50K list history has 3275, philosophy and religion together have less than half at 1437. Again this cannot be looked at in isolation but it could be said this gives the impression that on a whole the vital project seems to treat history as more vital than Philosophy and religion combined.

I do think religion is important but not more than history. Also many important events in the past that concern religion would be covered within history. The articles I would consider removing at a push would be philosophy or society. But even then I am not certain.

 Carlwev  07:21, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking at various metrics to compare, pageviews is only one of them. The two weakest articles at level 1 in my opinion are society and human history. As a human, I feel like the top 10 are a bit to human centric. Ideally, I'd like the vital articles to apply to topics that could technically transcend humanity. Religion, philosophy, technology, mathematics, etc. are things we might look for an understanding of in other species like elephants and chimps. If we ever get to meet ET, and learn to communicate, they will be topics of discussion. Human is one species, and human history gives that one species 20% of the space at vital 1. Another article I think might be good to consider might be Communication  2, perhaps swapping it with society. Other things besides human communicate, and you need communication for society. pageviews for Communication, history, human hisotry, and society show communication leads by a large margin. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:20, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The issue of anthropic bias has come up in previous discussions: check the archives. As long as Wikipedia is being written by humans for humans, I personally don't have an issue with our highest-priority articles being human-centric. We swapped language for society in 2021. Cobblet (talk) 06:02, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Previous discussions are fine, but consensus can change. The articles we have are human centric in their content even if they technically can be expanded to cover other sentient beings. Having two articles that are exclusive to our species has moved beyond human centric to human dominant in my opinion.

I looked at language as an option as well. On that, the lede for language is "Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary." I would argue communication is a higher level article than language based on this. The two have similar view counts over the past 10 years, with both being between 11 and 12 million, but language having a few hundred thousand more. Based on how close they were, and communication seeming the broader article, I believe it fits better then either language or society. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 06:31, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please see counter proposals below. Interstellarity (talk) 14:58, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nominating this to gather options on swap, but leaning towards oppose on this one, but staying neutral to gather some opinions.

Support

Oppose

1. Oppose Science means often natural sciences, especially in English context. Philosophy is often associated with humanities and it includes the ethics. Religion covers ethics in a sociological sense, but not the science of ethics. --Thi (talk) 16:32, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
2. The interdisciplinary influence of philosophy is much wider and it would be challenging to find a discipline that is not in some form affected by it. This influence also extends to religions, which rely on various assumptions from branches of philosophy like metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Historically, most of the individual sciences, like physics and psychology, were part of philosophy before they became separate disciplines. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:03, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Math is essentially a sub field of Science, which is already listed.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 14:58, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

1. Oppose More important as a basic school subject. Mathematics is a universal concept. --Thi (talk) 16:32, 26 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
2. To me, mathematics seems to be more important because it is used in so many other fields. Mathematics is one of the main VA categories, so having an article from this field at level 1 makes sense. It's true that Mathematics overlaps with Science, but there is also overlap between Religion and Human. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:52, 27 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]