Board Thread:New Features/@comment-20644-20170522203248/@comment-26402117-20170615004712

I personally don't think linking episodes in the navigation would make four levels ideal if it's the lowest common denominator of media content. That isn't a perfectly clear hierarchy if the labels are the episode titles, or of high utility if the article names are the episode numbers. The links are also unlikely to get much traffic - behaviourally, people might want to see the finales and the season debuts specifically, but browse by category or list otherwise.

As a reader, I would probably head to an "episode guide", series article or "Season 1" page to try and get a wider view of the series. Failing that, I would search for a wide-scope media article, season article or episode list. I like to make informed choices about my browsing, so that I benefit from the wiki's content more. Finding a fully specific drill-down aspect of the series in each navigation is somewhat arbitrary when that functionality can be achieved with search or intermediary articles when context is missing.

While the original post lacks detail on what UX changes only having three levels would cause, I wouldn't agree that the choice of limiting those and using portals is going to overwhelm the user. Insights offers a perspective into what articles are most popular - the lists and portals big wikis use are consistently high-traffic because they are versatile, media-rich and they define the relationship between different levels in the hierarchy. They also bring in pageviews.

EDIT: An important SEO and UX consideration is the content-link balance of a wiki. Balancing that out makes those aspects of the wiki hierarchy clearer.