Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists)

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A list can stand alone as a self-contained page, or it can be embedded in an article.

List articles are encyclopedia pages consisting of a lead section followed by a list (which may or may not be divided by headings). The items on these lists include links to articles in a particular subject area and may include additional information about the listed items. The titles of stand-alone lists typically begin with the type of list it is (List of, Index of, etc.), followed by the article's subject; like: List of vegetable oils. They can be organised alphabetically, by subject classification or by topics in a flat or hierarchical structure.

Lists have three main purposes:

The list may be a valuable information source. This is particularly the case for a structured list. Examples would include lists organized chronologically, grouped by theme, or annotated lists.

Redundancy of lists and categories is beneficial because the two formats work together; the principle is covered in the guideline . Like categories, lists can be used for keeping track of changes in the listed pages, using the Related Changes feature. Unlike a category, a list also allows detection of deletion of its entries, and, more generally, a history of its contents is available; lists also permit a large number of entries to appear on a single page.

For a stand-alone list, the list's title is the page name. For an embedded list, the list's title is usually a section title (for instance, Latin Empire#Latin Emperors of Constantinople, 1204–1261), but it can be shorter. The list title should not be misleading and should normally not include abbreviations. Additionally, an overly precise list title can be less useful and can make the list difficult to find; the precise inclusion criteria for the list should be spelled out in the lead section (see below), not the title. For instance, words like complete and notable are normally excluded from list titles. Instead, the lead makes clear whether the list is complete or whether it is limited to widely-known or notable members (i.e., those that merit articles). Note that the word "famous" is considered an unnecessary "peacock" embellishment and should not be used.