Do not edit this page. This is the archive of User talk:Buaidh for the year 2009. (Please direct any additional comments to the current talk page.) See the annual archives for .

Please revert your edits in which you move {{ otheruses}} below the infobox, that is the incorrect order per Wikipedia:Lead section. Dabomb87 ( talk) 22:40, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

My discussion of this issue can be found at Wikipedia talk:Hatnote#Hatnotes and infoboxes. I believe that right-justified infoboxes are no infringment of our hatnotes at the top policy. Thanks, Buaidh ( talk) 22:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

First of all, gain consensus for your edits before mass-changing all the state articles. Realize that all articles, have followed the previous layout, and there is not a style-independent reason to change them now. Second, in some edits, you moved the hatnotes below the cleanup templates. That is definitely not an improvement. Now, if you do gain consensus for this, please post the change of the style at the relevant talk pages, such as WT:LAYOUT, WT:MOS, and WT:FAC. Thanks, Dabomb87 ( talk) 23:03, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

The reason for the hatnotes first policy is not just because of appearance; screen-readers for the disabled display everything sequentially. Therefore, the hatnote must come first. See Wikipedia:Accessibility#Article structure Dabomb87 ( talk) 23:10, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

He has not yet been confirmed. Wiki does not predict the future or what is expected to happen, only what does happen. Let's just wait a bit for it to be official? Thanks. Newguy34 ( talk) 16:40, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Answer on my talk page. :-) Cassandro ( talk) 17:43, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

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I've noticed you've been working on various Country outlines and country-related topic lists. Good work.

Because it relates to what you've been doing, I thought you'd like to be informed of this...

There was a problem with the set of pages with the names "List of x-related topics", where "x" is a country's name. Well, there were two different types of lists mixed together and competing for those names, so I've separated them into two different sets (each set with its own naming). The alphabetical indexes I've been renaming to "List of x-related articles", and I've compiled a list of the pages in the other set at User:The Transhumanist/Country-related topics list set.

By the way, keep up the good work.

The Transhumanist 04:20, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Since last spring, I've been leading a team of editors in the development of a set of country outlines - one for every country (present-day nation or state) of the World. They are part of Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge.

The goal is to get these complete (and error-free) enough to move to article space. So far, only 29 have been moved there. All the rest are sitting in the Wikipedia namespace as drafts.

We've been focusing on applying advanced wiki-tools (such as WP:AWB, WP:WikEd, and WP:LINKY) to do rapid batchwork on these outlines. That is, making the same edit or change to all the outlines in passes with automated or semi-automated tools.

If you are interested in joining the team and receiving assignments (and instruction on how to use the advanced tools), drop me a note.

By the way, are you registered to use WP:AWB?

Do you have Firefox installed (it's needed for WP:WikEd and WP:LINKY to run).

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist 04:20, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Can I ask a favor?

Can you do dates like this:

February 5, 2009

Instead of like this:

2009-02-09

...in the body of articles? Like that for your access/retrieved date is fine, but for normal encyclopedia reading, the standard for that country is preferred.

From: Wikipedia:Dates

• "YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness. (If the only purpose why they are used in a particular table is ease of comparison, consider using 1 November 2008.) Because some perceive dates in that style to be in conformance with the current ISO 8601 standard, that format should never be used for a date that is not in the (proleptic) Gregorian calendar, nor for any year outside the range 1583 through 9999."

There is more at that link about dates. If 95% of the articles about U.S. geographic places (states/counties/cities and towns) are "X", then "Y" looks out of place. If doing former British Empire places, then 5 February 2009 is the norm.

Thank you,

- 207.69.139.157 ( talk) 23:59, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I've replied to your chart post on my talk page. (You missed the outline on Saint Martin, by the way - I fixed the link). The Transhumanist 04:13, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I would be happy to work on the topic outlines for the nations of the Americas. I have not used the Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, although AWB and other tools might be useful. I use both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0. -- Buaidh ( talk) 15:16, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Cool. Here are your assignments:

1. Your first task is to request AWB registration. (Though you won't be using AWB today - it can take up to a day or two to get approved).
2. Now install Firefox, and the Linky add-on to Firefox, and upgrade your account by adding WP:WikEd to your monobook.js page.
3. Create a bulleted list in ( User:Buaidh/Country outlines of the Americas), with just the links to those outlines. You'll be using this list with AWB and Firefox/Linky.
4. Read the Linky tutorial, and from the list you just created load all the Americas country outlines into tabs (subwindows within your Firefox window) - highlight the links by click-holding and dragging your mouse, then right click to activate the pop-up menu, click on Linky in that menu, and choose "Open Selected Links in tabs". Once you've done this, get a feel for Firefox's tab controls by cycling through the pages by repeatedly pressing Ctrl-tab and then repeatedly pressing Shift-Ctrl-tab, and then try Ctrl-W on them all. Simple, but powerful.
5. They should all have disappeared. Load the country outlines with Linky again.
6. Pick one entry (like "pronunciation" or any line - you choose). Then, using Ctrl-tab, inspect that entry on all of the outlines.
7. Next task: add a general map of the country (showing borders, towns, roads, rivers, etc.) to the current outline (click save), then press Ctrl-W to remove the tab and move instantly to the next one. Repeat (add map). Do that for all the Americas country outlines. Use another window to hunt for the maps at Commons - choose the best one for each country. Look at the country outlines listed at Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge#Geography and places to see how maps were placed on those. I've been using 300px as the standard size for images and maps, but feel free to decide on a case-by-case basis and use whatever size that looks best. Note that these are general maps or road maps - not administrative section maps that show just the states, provinces, or counties, etc. (that's a future task for the administrative divisions sections).
8. Next task: the outlines also need a satellite photo of the country in the Geography section. Find and place one in each.

Feel free to ask me questions.

Good luck.

Have fun.

The Transhumanist 01:37, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Please be careful to keep standard links the same. That is, the links that have the same form on all the outlines (you can find them at Template:Topic outline country).

For example, the "cuisine of" links are all the same on the outlines. To make them blue (we call this "bluelinking"), we are creating redirects to the various country cuisine articles. See Cuisine of Germany, Cuisine of France, and Cuisine of Italy, for instance.

There are several reasons for this. One is that "Cuisine of" always stays in the same place on the list. The adjectival forms would jump all over the place, which would make comparing countries harder.

Another reason is for standardization. These outlines are central, and as such they are establishing the standards for editors who come to them from all over Wikipedia (from many different countries). The names of country-related articles up until now have not been standardized. By creating a standard name for them, we can tie them all together with redirects. That way, at least one standard name will work for all related countries-specific articles.

Having the standard redirects makes look-ups much easier. See the "Navy of", "Army of", and "Air Force of" links, for example. It's very hard to remember the names of the various military branches for each country, so having standard article synonyms like this really help.

Another important reason is that the redirects can be used in multiple places, and then to update the links in all those places all you have to do is update the redirect.

And the names were also chosen to support coverage expansion. For example, instead of placing section links in the outlines, create a redirect to it. Then when an actual article is created on the redirected page, the link to it will already be correct. Demographics statistics usually start out in a country's "Geography of" article. We would place a redirect on the "Demographics of" page. When the Geography is expanded and the demographics section split off to "Demographic of", the link to "Demographic of" is already in place on the corresponding outline.

The Transhumanist 05:49, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Development has been slow but continuous:

Penubag has done a fantastic job on the images for the awards we'll be using for our project's collaborations and contests. We now have 3 awards: a medal, a trophy, and a race ribbon. They all look tight. The trophy needs a small adjustment, but other than that, all 3 awards are complete and ready to use.

Spartaz has warned us of (threatened to take) G4 (speedy delete) action if we run a competition that resembles the previously deleted Awards Center page. So whatever we do, any contests we run must differ substantially from the methods used there.

One type of competition I've been exploring is edit racing. I'm in the process of working the bugs out of this concept - the first race didn't work as expected - you see, because we only had an award for first place, the opponent didn't think it worthwhile to continue once it was clear who the winner would be. And since editors are in different time zones and usually need to start the race at different times, we need to base winning on personal start times - he who completes his assigned edits in the least time (rather than first), wins. And last but not least is quality control. What good is winning if your edits are ripe with errors? So I'll be exploring possibilities such as using a referee (whoever is overseeing a particular race), having participants watching each other for errors to knock them back, etc. I'm not sure yet.

Rich Farmbrough has been applying his bot expertise to filling in blanks in the country outlines (the population and area entries). I'm amazed at the number of edits he pumps out each day on a myriad of projects - ours makes up but a small time slice of his activity, and yet he has saved us many hours of manual work. Perhaps we should look into how he gets so much done.  :)

Zlerman has chosen to work on one outline at a time, and is taking on Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. He also has been keen on noticing and reporting design issues pertaining to the whole set of country outlines. Keep up the good work!

Highfields has been filling in the names of capitals, and is our first race winner. Check out the award on his user pages.

As you probably know, this project has expanded to include working on any and all sets of pages that are linked to from the country outlines. Once the set of country outlines go live (in article space), traffic will likely increase for all the links included on them. The quality and usefulness of those pages will reflect heavily on the country outlines (the outlines, which are essentially lists of links, are only as good as the links they present), and therefore we've branched out to solve the biggest problems with those as well. So far, we've taken on:

• The creation of disambiguation pages for country adjectivals (" German", " French", " Taiwanese", etc. About half done.)
• The clean-up of the CIA World Factbook statistics on the "demographics of" country pages. We've been renaming those sections to provide a key string that AWB can use for targetting (for skipping and filtering). Once that's done, we'll be able to break the clean-up down into simple AWB search/replace tasks, because we'll be able to target just those pages that include the CIA stuff.
• Renaming the "Cuisine of" articles to their adjectival forms ("Chinese cuisine", "Italian cuisine", etc.)

Blackadam2 and Thehelpfulone have been helping out with the "demographics of" pages mentioned above.

And we have a couple speed addicts (addicted to wiki-velocity, not drugs)...

Both Robert Skyhawk and Thehelpfulone prefer (and excel at) simple AWB search/replaces. Robert hasn't actually joined our team yet, but he has been helping out quite a bit from the sidelines (via the WP:AWB/Tasks page. Unfortunately, there has recently been a non-AWB chore that has been holding things up on the AWB front - an edit to all the the headings which had to be reverted before too many new edits were made, because any new edits would make the reversion more difficult. The headings have been restored, so now the way is clear for AWB operations, and there are many search/replace tasks in the queue. AWB assignments have started again!

There's a similar bottleneck on the "Demographics of" pages (the "keying" mentioned above), but that's almost cleared too.  :)

With my internet access somewhat crippled, I've been finding it difficult to keep up with you guys. However, I expect to be accessing a Linky-capable workstation on a faster server (I'm on it right now, as you can probably tell from my contributions list for today), and so I should really pick up speed. Feels goooooood.  :)

Recruiting has been a bit slow (but steady), due in part to my crippled access, and because we've been waiting for the images for the awards to be completed. I expect the team to grow more rapidly as the bottlenecks are removed.

Well that's what's been happenin', and here's what's in the pipeline...

I'm about to begin work on a set of lists that corresponds to all the standard links on the country outlines, and these will be presented on the Topic outline of countries which will be organized exactly like the country outlines. Aside from being an extremely useful navigation aid, it will allow editors to easily see the state of country coverage on Wikipedia. I'll provide you with a link once I get up to speed on this.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Cheers,

The Transhumanist 05:21, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

There has been a flurry of activity on the project as of late - so much so that I felt compelled to write another progress report...

More racing award graphics!

Penubag has completed 4 more award graphics for our upcoming edit races. They look great!

New outline developer

Buaidh has joined the effort to develop country outlines. Like Zlerman, he has chosen specific outlines to work on. Which ones? All the countries of the Americas!

Bots!

User talk:Thehelpfulone now has a bot, and User talk:Robert Skyhawk has requested approval for one. Work on the country outlines using these should start soon. I feel the technological singularity approaching.  :)

Regex

Several of us have been trying to figure out how to use regular expressions (regex), in AWB, and once we have done this, we should be able to insert country names into entries for all the outlines using a single search/replace regex.

User talk:Thehelpfulone has successfully used AWB and regex to complete a 2-line search/replace using the \n command.

Regex repository - please add to it!

As a reference aid, I've set up the page User:The Transhumanist/Regexes for reporting the regexes we use. Please post regexes you've used successfully to that page. That way, everyone on the team can learn from each others' successes and we thereby leverage our experience collectively. Thank you.

The Transhumanist 22:35, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Not sure why the material was deleted in Greenland. I assumed that it was vandalism until I saw this page. I assume you had a reason but don't know what it was. Student7 ( talk) 01:29, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Each country has an alphabetical list of topics located at List of Country-related articles and a hierarchical list of topics located at Topic outline of Country. We try to encourage contributors to place all links to related topics in those articles rather than clutter up the See also section with a random subset of those topics. (Note the <!-- Please place links to all topics directly related to Greenland in the [[List of Greenland-related topics]] --> request.) -- Buaidh ( talk) 15:12, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I would be happy to work on the topic outlines for the nations of the Americas. I have not used the Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, although AWB and other tools might be useful. I use both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0. -- Buaidh ( talk) 15:16, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Cool. Here are your assignments:

1. Your first task is to request AWB registration. (Though you won't be using AWB today - it can take up to a day or two to get approved).
2. Now install Firefox, and the Linky add-on to Firefox, and upgrade your account by adding WP:WikEd to your monobook.js page.
3. Create a bulleted list in ( User:Buaidh/Country outlines of the Americas), with just the links to those outlines. You'll be using this list with AWB and Firefox/Linky.
4. Read the Linky tutorial, and from the list you just created load all the Americas country outlines into tabs (subwindows within your Firefox window) - highlight the links by click-holding and dragging your mouse, then right click to activate the pop-up menu, click on Linky in that menu, and choose "Open Selected Links in tabs". Once you've done this, get a feel for Firefox's tab controls by cycling through the pages by repeatedly pressing Ctrl-tab and then repeatedly pressing Shift-Ctrl-tab, and then try Ctrl-W on them all. Simple, but powerful.
5. They should all have disappeared. Load the country outlines with Linky again.
6. Pick one entry (like "pronunciation" or any line - you choose). Then, using Ctrl-tab, inspect that entry on all of the outlines.
7. Next task: add a general map of the country (showing borders, towns, roads, rivers, etc.) to the current outline (click save), then press Ctrl-W to remove the tab and move instantly to the next one. Repeat (add map). Do that for all the Americas country outlines. Use another window to hunt for the maps at Commons - choose the best one for each country. Look at the country outlines listed at Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge#Geography and places to see how maps were placed on those. I've been using 300px as the standard size for images and maps, but feel free to decide on a case-by-case basis and use whatever size that looks best. Note that these are general maps or road maps - not administrative section maps that show just the states, provinces, or counties, etc. (that's a future task for the administrative divisions sections).
8. Next task: the outlines also need a satellite photo of the country in the Geography section. Find and place one in each.

Feel free to ask me questions.

Good luck.

Have fun.

The Transhumanist 01:37, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Another use for User:Buaidh/Country outlines of the Americas is as a watchlist. When viewing the page, click on "Related changes" in the toolbox menu in the sidebar on the right of the screen (assuming you use Wikipedia's monobook skin - the default skin). Related changes will show you a list of the edit summaries for all the recent edits done to all the pages listed on that page. You can therefore use the list as a more focused watchlist to keep your eye on what others are doing to those pages. The Transhumanist 04:52, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Maps and satellite photos

By the way, any luck on this part of your assignment above? Have you run into any difficulties or confusion?

Let me know, and I'll be happy to help you overcome any obstacles.

The Transhumanist 04:52, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Be sure to welcome our newest member, User talk:NuclearWarfare, to the team!

See his talk page for the task he's taking on.

The Transhumanist 00:02, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

The Transhumanist 16:33, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Why are you creating so many new, redundant flag templates? Why is it necessary to write {{flag|Dronning Maud Land}} instead of {{flagicon|Norway}} [[Dronning Maud Land]], for example? In WP:WikiProject Flag Template, we have been maintaining country data templates for entities with unique flags only. Thanks for any clarification — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 19:36, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

This is the only warning you will receive for your disruptive edits.
The next time you create an inappropriate page, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia.

There is nothing wrong with being bold, (and assuming good faith) I will assume that when you turned the redirect List of countries back into an article page, that you had not read the talk page and archives of Talk:List of sovereign states, and did not realise that you were creating the list against consensus. However once this was made clear to you on Talk:List of countries you should not have reinstated your new page at Countries of the world. But assuming good faith, until User:Pfainuk pointed it out you might not of known that it was not a suitable thing to do. I my opinion when you did the same thing again with Countries of the Earth that is disruption. Other editors have better things to do than play wack a rat with you. Unless you can build a consensus at Talk:List of sovereign states for the creation of such a page, if you do the same with any other page, involving list of nations, list of countries, or list of sovereign states, I will block you account for a time for disruption. -- PBS ( talk) 12:04, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

From my talk page:

I realize that there has been much controversy over what constitutes a country or nation, but to adopt a single political definition defies the very basis of what Wikipedia stands for. Surely there is some place we can put a list of geographic countries and not have it deleted by those who insist upon a single political definition. What do you suggest? [1]

My warning is not against you arguing your case on the talk page of Talk:List of sovereign states and building a consensus for such a page, It was a warning against repeatedly placing a page at a different title to try to sidestep the current consensus against such a page. To date you have not addressed the points put to you on Talk:List of countries, so please address your question to Talk:List of sovereign states and I and others can discuss it with you and you can try to build a consensus for the creation of a list of countries. -- PBS ( talk) 16:05, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Block

You have been blocked from editing for violating Wikipedia policy. If you believe this block is unjustified you may contest this block by replying here on your talk page by adding the text {{unblock|your reason here}}. You may also email the blocking administrator or any administrator from this list instead, or mail unblock-en-l@mail.wikimedia.org.

You created a page called Table of country-related information [2] which is a recreation of Countries of the world [3]. Contry to my warning you did not discuss this at Talk:List of sovereign states and build a consensus for such a page. I am blocking your account for 24 hours for disruption. -- PBS ( talk) 18:57, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I used a portion of an old table (that you found objectionable) to create hyperlinks to the country outlines of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#Outlines of countries on which I am (or rather was) working. This table has absolutely nothing to do with the List of sovereign states. Please take a look at it and judge for yourself. Thanks, Buaidh ( talk) 19:31, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Help! Let me out! Uncle! Uncle! I can't breath! PBS is God! Your good buddy, Buaidh ( talk) 22:26, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

If you are moving all of the articles entitled Topic outline of X to Outline of X, why did you bother to move many articles entitled List of X-related topics to List of X-related articles? There may be a few conflicts with other articles entitled Outline of X that are not related to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge. I'm concerned that we may be seriously overreaching (but then you are a transhumanist, aren't you). -- Buaidh ( talk) 21:11, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The "x-related articles" pages are alphabetical indexes. The "x-related topics" pages are a set of lists with a shared format all their own. Separating the two sets just seemed logical, so that the index set can be completed.

I've looked over the outline field and I'm pretty sure there won't be any direct title conflicts. But even if there are a few, they'll be easy to deal with.

Besides, "topic outline" isn't holding up very well as a title because outlines on Wikipedia are continuously evolving toward a hybrid form of outline. A "topic outline" is an outline composed of the topics of the outline's subject, as opposed to being composed of sentences - which is called a "sentence outline". Most of our outlines have elements of both, and other elements as well, so they can't accurately be referred to as either "topic outlines" or "sentence outlines". That makes the more general term "outline" a much better fit.

The Transhumanist 22:11, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Is this the final title change for a while, or are others in the works. -- Buaidh ( talk) 22:26, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

For outline pages, "Outline of" is the final destination as far as I am concerned. As for other page types, there are no more renames of sets in the works at the moment, as far as I know. But it's inevitable, don't you think?  :)

The Transhumanist 00:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I've noticed you've been editing "see also" sections of various country articles and are adding some unnecessary links. For example, adding United Nations to the see also section of a country is too vague, and links that are already linked in the body of the article should not be in the see also section too, so adding Commonwealth of Nations for example may not be necessary because it's probably already linked in the article. Ideally for country articles, it would be nice for the see also section to simply contain links to the outline of the country and to the list of related articles. That avoids clutter and allows all the links to be consolidated to the one list article. I also noticed you are adding links to various languages of Wikipedia in the see also section. This isn't very helpful, someone can simply click on the interwiki language link on the left side of the screen to get to the language they want, it's not necessary to include this in the see also too, it just adds more clutter. LonelyMarble ( talk) 21:51, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Hey, another comment, I noticed you are adding the same see also sections to the outline articles. That seems good to me since those are list-type articles. Things like list of international rankings and list of geography topics seem too vague to me to include on the main country page, but that seems fine to include on the outline page. I just think that including links that are not directly related to the subject on the main country article will cause too many links to form in the section when it could be nicely compact with just links to the list/outline articles. LonelyMarble ( talk) 22:34, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I noticed you moved a bunch of these lists to "Topic outline of".

Please keep in mind that that set of lists has never been part of the outline project. The country "-related topics" lists were an attempt to create a comprehensive structured index on various countries, and therefore their scope is different - they have strived to include all related links, while the outlines intend to include essential links. Because of their scope, the -related topics lists are likely to grow so large to need to be split - each split-off page would likely be a straight list, making the base page more of a list of lists.

We've stopped using the title "topic outline" because outline pages on Wikipedia can at any time take on aspects that detract from that model and render the title false. That is, a "topic outline" is an outline composed of topics only, so as soon as an editor comes along and adds an annotation or sentence, it ceases to be a topic outline and then has an erroneous title. "Sentence outlines" are outlines composed of sentences (each summarizing a point) - so we don't use this in the title either, because most outlines on Wikipedia include topic entries, or may have them added at any time.

Wikipedia outlines tend to include elements found in both of these types of outline and additional wiki-elements as well, such as descriptive lead sections (as per Wikipedia's List guideline). This mixture of elements, and the potential for them being added at any time by editors, makes the general term "Outline" more appropriate to describe Wikipedia's outlines.

The outlines for the various countries were located under the Outline of knowledge WikiProject, and have recently been moved to article space. Each is named "Outline of x". (where "x" is a country's name). Their format has been standardized to facilitate easy comparison between countries.

I hope the above explanation helps.

The Transhumanist 22:16, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Things have been slowing down again, so it's time for a big push...

We've gone live

This project needed a shot in the arm. Also, its draft pages have been littering Wikipedia's categories for months. The time seemed right to move all the country outline drafts to article space.

WHAT???

Well, the drafts had been sitting in Wikipedia space for a year.

WHAT???

Development has been moving at a snail's pace and we could use the help of the Wikipedia community at large (who are more likely to find these if they are in article space).

WHAT???

Yes, we've gone live.  :)

This puts pressure on us to get the blatantly incomplete elements of these outlines done. The only glaring problem is the government branches sections. These need to be corrected ASAP.

I've mentioned THE GOVERNMENT BRANCHES SECTIONS many times to many people over the past year, but the problem just doesn't seem to have been taken seriously. So let me put it another way:

HELP!!! I need your help on this now. Almost all the countries have a government with an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. The links for these branches need to be completed for each country outline:

Here's a convenient list you can use WP:LINKY on to access and edit these quickly. Please copy the link to the top of your talk page so that you can access it easily.

If you spot any standardization in links, and ways we can automate parts of this process, or for groups of countries that have links in common, please let me know!

Administrative support for outlines

There has been growing pressure on me to write up the administrative pages for outlines - their instructions, guidelines, etc. Therefore, I'm now in the process of composing these. Fortunately, it is mostly a matter of gathering material from messages I've written to you guys over the past year. Still, this is taking up most of my time, and I will be buried in these for the foreseeable future.

Traffic control

The next big task after the government branches sections are cleaned up is link support for the outlines.

There's quite a list of links and notices that need to be put in place around Wikipedia, providing access to them to readers, and alerting editors to the need to develop and maintain these pages. This will keep our bot people very busy (and happy).

But the most important thing right now is to get the government branches sections completed.

The Transhumanist 02:22, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Allow me to shift focus for the moment from the country outline project to outlines in general...

Where's the Outline of knowledge project headed?

It's growing fast, so fast that it is catching up to portals.

I just stumbled on to a subset of 50 more outlines (one for the history of each state of the United States), and have added them to the top of the outline. Buaidh, you've been busy - it's nice to meet another fanatic outliner.  :)

That brings the total number of outlines in article space to about 450.

It won't be long before there are more outlines than portals (which number about 600).

How long before outlines outnumber portals?

Four months, tops.

Then what?

I don't know. Do you have any ideas?

Of course the set will continue to grow. Which branch of knowledge should we tackle next?

And...

Perhaps we should push for Main page coverage?

Need for traffic analysis

We need to begin taking a deeper look at outlines and how they are integrated into (linked to from other pages on) Wikipedia, to optimize their usefulness.

The Traffic counter is useful for monitoring page traffic on Wikipedia.

Though I'm not sure exactly what it measures. Do you know?

What interests me most is the difference between outline traffic and portal traffic. Use the above counter on various portals and the corresponding outlines, to see what I mean.

Is the traffic volume of portals related to the structure of their links?

Where is portal traffic coming from? Can the answer be found in "What links here"?

And what about the portal menu bar at the top of every portal page? Does that account for the huge number of hits the main portal list gets each month?

I also wonder how much of the traffic comes from the Main page. Is there any way to tell?

If you have any ideas on this subject and how we should proceed, please visit my talk page and let me know!

And if you know of any other traffic analysis tools that we could make use of, please let me know!

The Transhumanist 19:15, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

The Transhumanist 01:15, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Do we really need an official endonym in addition to the official English country name for English speaking nations? They should always be the same. -- Buaidh ( talk) 22:21, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Combine the two entries? (Like " Head of state and government")

The Transhumanist 22:27, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Do we plan to display the endonym for non-English speaking countries as the foreign language endonym (e.g. for China, 中国); or the English language translation of the foreign language endonym (e.g., Middle Kingdom); or both (e.g., 中国 ( Mandarin Chinese language: Middle Kingdom)?

With the current entry that's on the outline, let's go with the English language translation of the foreign language endonym. But If you'd like to add the foreign language endonym as an additional entry, feel welcome to. The Transhumanist 19:14, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I needed a rest from countries...

The states of the United States

So I switched over to states. United States.

I've added outlines for all 50 to the Outline of knowledge.

How?

The main activity in creating these was using LINKY to execute advanced Google searches on all 50 states at the same time (do a single search on google, then on a Wikipedia user page create a list of state links, then search replace the front and back bracket pairs with the parts of the google search url that come before and after the state's name, respectively - once you have a list of searches, you can easily modify it with search/replaces. WikEd works great for this. The page I've been using for Linky loads is User:The Transhumanist/Google state searches - but I used it for more than just google searches: check the history to see the various link sets and google search sets I used for linky loads). The search strings "in x" and "of x" reveal a lot about a state. But the magic is in Firefox's tab navigation keys (Ctrl-W) and (Ctrl-tab), which provide a bird's eye view of the coverage of the whole set of subjects. Flipping between the search results for each state using the tab keys, you quickly notice the common titles ("Governor of x", for instance).

As I found common titles, I added them to Template:Outline U.S. State.

Besides Google searching, I used Linky to open all state articles at the same time, to look over their headings (those usually expand into stand-alone articles), and I added the main ones to the outline as well.

Using Linky again, I opened all the lists on the list of lists by state, to look for those with state subheadings. The outlines contain section links to the few of those I found.

When I couldn't stand building the template anymore, I used it to create 50 outlines! That was fun. It's like they appeared out of nowhere.

Further development

The region section contains temporary links - I knew that subset of links would get at least some matches, so I figured that would be better than nothing. I'll swap those out with an accurate list of regions for each state as I find the time. Feel free to jump in and help - I'm not greedy.  :)

The standard links I used for the government branches sections matched almost all the states, except for a few in the legislative section. It won't take me long to finish fixing these - there are only a handful left.

There are fewer fill-in items on these outlines compared to those for countries. So these will be much faster to complete. And there's only 50 pages, which makes passes go by very quickly (less than an hour for most passes).

One nice side-effect of doing passes on these outlines is that you naturally memorize the 50 states (forward and backward, if you reverse your passes to alleviate monotony).  :)

That brings the total number of outlines on Wikipedia to about 500

Which puts us within 100 titles of portals.

Further coverage of geography

Political divisions lend themselves to rapid outline development because of common titles.

Other sets that are begging for creation include:

• the constituent countries of the UK (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland)

  Already created see Constituent countries of the United Kingdom -- PBS ( talk) 19:18, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

• the provinces of Canada
• the provinces of France
• other sets of subdivisions that have extensive coverage on Wikipedia
• the major cities of the world (those with lots of articles about them)

That last item on the list above looks especially juicy. My mouth is watering.

Cities are pretty fun. So far I've only completed two of them (because they happened to be city-states and were included in the set of country outlines we've been working on): Outline of Macau and Outline of Vatican City. I especially enjoyed outlining Vatican City, because WP:COMMONS had lots of pictures to choose from.

Though cities in general will probably require the building of a new template.

The Transhumanist 21:01, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

In response to your post on my user talk page, my comments on this topic are on the article talk page. -- Orlady ( talk) 13:26, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I have nominated Great Parks Bicycle Route, an article that you created, for deletion. I do not think that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Great Parks Bicycle Route. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. StarM 03:22, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The award images are complete!

After months of toil and attention to detail, Penubag has completed the set of images for this WikiProject's awards!

There are five race ribbons:

There's an engraved medallion:

And by far the hardest to create, a golden trophy:

If you have any ideas about awards these images can be placed upon, and how to award them (to show appreciation and to attract participants), please let me know.

And be sure to pop by Penubag's talk page to let him know what you think of his graphics artistry.

The Transhumanist 21:09, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Buaidh, I'd like to learn what you think about the Geography WikiProject's administration - how can we best attract new participants?

From my talk page:

I don't understand why this issue of countries/ nations/ states/ stateless nations/ sovereign states/ dependent states/ self-governing states/ non-self-governing states has not been discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries rather than among a small clique of editors. Perhaps someone can enlighten me. I had a pretty good idea of what a country was at age five, but it seems that many people can debate this question for a lifetime. Your aye, Buaidh ( talk) 21:06, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I always thought of England as a country. Oh well. I've referred to them on the OOK as " political divisions", so as to stay out of the line of fire.  :) That heading allows easy inclusion of subdivisions (like the states under the United States, etc.) Besides, each individual outline clarifies what the the entity being covered is, to alleviate any doubt or confusion.

Unless someone strongly suggests a discussion be taken to a wider venue, most issues are decided on the talk pages of the articles involved. That explains the small clique.

Note that all issues are open to re-evaluation by the community. But if you do so, you should have all drafts ready, as well as a well-written proposal. The proposal should be posted on the talk page of the most relevant WikiProject, and then an announcement placed on the talk pages of all the affected articles, and on WP:VPR. And of course, you should have several people read over the proposal and make suggestions before you post it.

I hope that helps.

The Transhumanist 23:40, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

If you had done what I proposed and discussed this at Talk:List of sovereign states then the problems could have been discussed and a consensus reached over whether another list is needed and what would be an appropriate name or the list. I placed a temporary ban on you because you went ahead and created another similar list without discussing it at the forum I suggested, or announcing at that forum that you were discussing it elsewhere.

There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries but it is on a sub page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Lists of countries (and not obvious). You say that you "a pretty good idea of what a country was at age five" in which case you will know that England is a country. The problem is that country has more than one meaning and to create a "list of countries" is an ambiguous name, in the same way as "List of states" or "List of nations" is an ambiguous. Think of Czechoslovakia, it was a state with territory which it controlled (sovereign states have to have control of territory to be a sovereign state) but was it one nation or two nations, one country or two countries? Because of the common usage of state in the USA, if someone was to create a "list of states" most Americans would immediately see that such a title was inappropriate if the list only contained sovereign states, but they have more difficulty in grasping that country and nation have similar problems (perhaps because since the Civil War they have been encouraged to see themselves as "One Nation under God, indivisible ..."), but because of the common usage in the UK (and Ireland) this is something that most British people recognise more easily. -- PBS ( talk) 10:01, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

"Devolution in the UK need not take the rest of the world hostage." it is nothing to do with devolution in the UK any more than " List of states" is a matter of refighting the American Civil War in the the United States. It is a matter of making sure that ambiguity in list names are avoided. A list like " List of national anthems" is relatively easy to construct because one is looking at a proper noun and not making an arbitrary list (as soon as someone starts to exclude nations because they are not a state then one has a problem because clearly "Flow of Scotland" is a National Anthem. Lists based on Nation and Country end up in endless debates over what is a nation what is a country (as would a " list of states"), so it is better to avoid those titles as the names of lists which are not lists of proper nouns. If you look at the endless debates over the inclusion or exclusion of Scotland, Twain, Palestine, etc etc, you will see why it is best not to create lists that can be used as a new forum for these debates.

If you do not agree with me, I see little point in discussing it bilaterally. Please use one of the forums where this has been debated and discuss it further to see if there is a suitable name, for which there is a consensus, for you list, before recreating your list in article space. -- PBS ( talk) 13:45, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

I see you have been hard at work on these.

Nice.

I agree with the move of the portal boxes to the see also section. I placed them at the top out of an old habit.

The formatting (display properties) of the flag/coat-of-arms box seems to be quirky regardless of where we put it. In its new location in the lead section, it overlaps text on some of the outlines. That's going to need some trouble-shooting.

I've only done a simple scan of your edits so far. I'll comment on the rest after I dive back into editing the outlines.

Keep up the excellent work.

The Transhumanist 23:55, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

To browse the links of the country outlines by topic (to see which ones are red), take a look at the lists listed at User:The Transhumanist/Lists by country.

The Transhumanist 01:11, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Hello,

Just to let you know, no British Overseas Territory has the words "British Overseas Territory" in its official name - it's equivalent to saying that the official name of the USA is the Federal Republic of the United States of America. Similarly the Crown Dependencies do not have the words "Crown Dependency" in their official names and the SBAs do not include the word "British" in their official name. Pfainuk talk 22:23, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office prefers the nomenclature Cayman Islands (British Overseas Territory) to the British Overseas Territory of the Cayman Islands. See the FCO. -- Buaidh ( talk) 13:46, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I am aware of the page you are referring to, but your link didn't work for me. The correct version now appears to be at [4].

If so, then that page says pretty clearly, "Full Name: Cayman Islands". Far from implying the Cayman Islands' official name is "Cayman Islands (British Overseas Territory)", they actually state outright that it is "Cayman Islands". Pfainuk talk 14:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

You may wish to review the British Overseas Territories Act 2002. -- Buaidh ( talk) 15:00, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

As you did to List of Egypt-related articles. If you think the redirect is improper, please nominate it at WP:RFD. Carlossuarez46 ( talk) 15:37, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I was temporarily blocking a double redirect that will be reused in the future. I will provide an explanation. -- Buaidh ( talk) 15:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Please do not blank content as you did to List of Argentina-related topics. If you think the redirect is improper, please nominate it at WP:RFD. -- Alexf ^(talk) 16:42, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry. This was my error. We have many articles being moved around. -- Buaidh ( talk) 16:45, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed you did the same to dozens of other List-related articles. Would you care to explain? Who's "we" and why? I ask you to please stop this mass-editing and explain the reasoning. We can discuss it here or if you prefer, we can get more exposure, and comments at ANI. Just please stop now before consensus is obtained. -- Alexf ^(talk) 16:48, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Addendum: After this notice, you have done some more blanking, and you even undid my restoration of the Argentina article. Last friendly warning. Please stop and we take this to ANI for explanation and consensus. Else you will be blocked until the issue is resolved. -- Alexf ^(talk) 16:57, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

A case has been opened at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Buaidh_in_a_blanking_rampage_of_redirection_pages.. Please discuss there instead. Thank you for your prompt attention to the issue. -- Alexf ^(talk) 17:03, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

These moves have been made primarily by the User:The Transhumanist on behalf of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#Outlines of countries. Over the past several years, several different article name formats have been used for similar types of country-related articles. Examples include:

• Index of Country-related articles
• Index of Country-related topics
• List of Country-related articles
• List of Country-related topics
• Outline of Country
• Outline of Country-related articles
• Outline of Country-related topics
• Topic outline of Country

Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge is attempting to standardize on the following three article title formats:

• Outline of Country - a hierarchical outline of country-related topics
• List of Country-related topics - an alphabetical list of country-related topics
• Index of Country-related articles - an alphabetical index of country-related articles

I am currently attempting to clean up double redirects. -- Buaidh ( talk) 17:12, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Alexf did not say you were moving articles. And you were going around to a lot of List of ''Some-country''-related topics and replacing redirect statements with signed comments of the form "This article is awaiting reconstruction". For future reference, do not delete redirects without good reason, and do not leave your signature in article pages. -- Donald Albury 18:52, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

User:Alexf did accuse me of some sort of devious conspiracy. A little common courtesy is not out of order.

Is not a double redirect a good reason to remove a redirect? A new article will eventually be created where the double redirect was. I left my signature just to establish a reference date. -- Buaidh ( talk) 19:02, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Alexf did not accuse you of a "devious conspiracy". I asked why were you mass blanking articles and opened a case at AIV where you can freely explain and discuss your actions. You should not sign articles in main space (as per MOS). If you want a "reference date", whatever that means, you place it in the article's talk page. Mass-blanking of articles is not the way to go. If you want to fix a double-redirect, please do so. Blanking is against the rules. -- Alexf ^(talk) 19:19, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, perhaps you don't understand. These double redirects are both double and obsolete. They no longer point toward an appropriate article. At some time in the future they may be reused. My options appear to be: (1) disable the redirect, (2) redirect toward some bogus target, (3) delete the redirect. Do you have a fourth alternative? -- Buaidh ( talk) 19:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

3-Delete the redirect is the way to go. Blanking or making bogus pages is not. There is a process at RFD for this. -- Alexf ^(talk) 19:38, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Cool, I'll nuke 'em. The only reason I saved the articles is so they could be reused. It's much easier for me. -- Buaidh ( talk) 19:40, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi everyone.

Things are going slow again. Where have you been?!

Maybe what you need to get you going is a little competition...

Who are we competing with?

Encyclopedia Britannica. Specifically, with its Outline of knowledge (presented in its volume called the Propaedia). Currently, they're kicking our asses. You've really got to check out their Outline of Knowledge (available only in the encyclopedia's paper edition - not the online version).

Portals. Informally, of course, just for the fun of it. There are around 600 portals. We're about 100 behind them, with about 500 outlines. Let's blow past them and leave 'em in the dust!

Confusion in editors at large

Now that the country outlines have been moved to the encyclopedia proper (article space), recruiting help on these is of high priority -- it will soon be time to alert all relevant editors to the nature and function of these and how they relate to other country coverage on Wikipedia.

However, I've noticed instances in which editors do not understand the nature and function of outline pages, and complain that they are redundant to articles. Well, ya. (That's the point of an outline - to provide the essentials in a structure for greater understanding, for easy viewing and faster reading, and to provide a topical guide).

A few editors over the years have viewed outlines as redundant to portals, not understanding the purpose and scope of outlines, nor the benefits provided by their structure and standardization.

These problems of misunderstanding need to be solved before "going public", to prevent their expansion as the community's awareness of these pages increases. Consider the response we'd get now if we announced these pages on the talk pages of 500 WikiProjects, 500 article talk pages, and placed links in 500 see also sections, etc.

That could be a nightmare.

So...

Encyclopedic and administrative support

I've been working on a couple things that will help alleviate confusion and hopefully reduce the need for editors to ask questions and seek advice. They're drafts, still under construction. Please look these over and jump in and help complete them (directly or by providing feedback):

First is an Outline article draft, intended to replace the current Outline article.

Next is a guideline on the Outline of knowledge and its outline pages.

Let me know what you think. Do they help you understand outlines better and how to develop them on Wikipedia? What is missing? How can they be improved?

The Transhumanist 04:47, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

As the country outlines have been approaching completion and more attention has been given to the non-country outlines and the Outline of knowledge as a whole, I've run into this...

Topic lists

As you know, we've been cleaning up sets of pages the links of which are displayed on the outlines.

One of the most prominent of the sets presented are the "List of x topics" (including "List of x-related topics) pages, and they are in a sorry state.

There's actually 2 different kinds mixed together in the same set: most of them are alphabetical indexes.

The others are non-alphabetical hierarchical lists. That is...

outlines!

So, I've been renaming the indexes to "Index of x articles" or "Index of x-related articles", and wikifying them (especially their lead sections). So far, all the country-related topics lists that are indexes have been renamed. It appears the new name fits so well that nobody favors the old name over the new. It's been over a week since that was done, with no complaints, so I've started on the rest.

As for the topic lists that are outlines, those can be absorbed or merged into the OOK. Even though this would entail a lot of renaming and reformatting, and cutting and pasting, these pages might still save us some work! I'm not sure how many there are, but that should become clear once the index pages are all renamed.

Feel free to join in an help. It's hog's heaven!

The Transhumanist 04:40, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

In response to a friend on Wikipedia who was wondering about how I've been and what I've been up to, I got to spewing about our little endeavor, and well, I got so carried away I pretty much told him everything.  :) The message turned out to be a pretty good summary of what we've accomplished so far and the overall plan.

See User talk:The Rambling Man#What's up?

The Transhumanist 22:58, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Momentum in the development of the outlines is continuing to build, even though we haven't added any new outlines lately. Plenty of work is being done on the outlines we already have.

Keep up the good work everyone!

Inspiration!

Kudos go to Buaidh, who has dived head first into outline development, continuing improvement of the country outlines, and doing so vigorously. Take a look at his contribs. He has taken the initiative and has been expanding those outlines' design and coverage. Be sure to let him know what you think of his work!

Coming soon: the Super Huge Expansion (it will be really really big)

Excitement (mine at least) is building as we approach the Super Huge Expansion, during which notices will be placed on thousands of subject talk pages and their corresponding WikiProjects (see below concerning which ones). Though not all on the same day! - this will take place over a period of weeks or months, because it's best not to open the flood gates all at once.

The existing outlines should serve as strong examples for editors who wish to develop new outlines, and so we need to complete them as much as we can before we start to take this to the next level (in about 3 months). The rewrite of the outline article (the draft, which explains outlines in detail), and the guideline on outlines and outline development, also need to be completed before the transcendence begins. These will help guide the decisions and actions of editors, and reduce confusion.

Projected outline, at the OOK WikiProject page

What's next? Where is the Outline of knowledge headed?

Well, it will grow, to encompass all of human knowledge.

But, is there a plan?

YES!!!

Currently under construction on the Outline of knowledge WikiProject page is a version of the outline that will display links to all the outline pages currently in the encyclopedia proper, links to all outline drafts, and redlinks to all planned outline drafts.

You can help. Please place links to the remaining drafts in there (with complete pagenames so we can easily tell they are drafts). Once all the draft pages are placed, please look over the overall outline for gaps in coverage, and add missing subjects. I expect there are thousands of missing subjects extensive enough to benefit from being outlined. New subjects should be included as red draft links. Thank you.

But it's not just an editing task list...

During the upcoming "Super Huge Expansion" (mentioned above), the article talk page and WikiProject for each of the subjects listed on the projected outline will receive a notice requesting the creation and development of the outline page for that subject. Each notice will also explain how a subject's outline will integrate into the Outline of knowledge and into Wikipedia's navigation system as a whole.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#Projected outline.

Topic lists

The nice thing about a reverse outline is that it turns up problems that exist in the publication being outlined, which provides opportunities to fix them. Since we get very little or no opposition to fixing problems even on sets of hundreds of pages, we've been plowing through them.

One of the biggest problems in Wikipedia that our work on the Outline of knowledge has uncovered so far is with the set of topics lists. Their titles, in the forms "List of x topics" and "List of x-related topics" are ambiguous, and they are not the most common terms for describing their content. See WP:COMMONNAME. To make matters worse, the set is divided between 2 competing types/sets of pages: alphabetical indexes, and outlines.

In an effort to sort out this mess, the indexes are being renamed, and the outlines are being reformatted and moved, or merged, into the Outline of knowledge.

So far, almost 300 topic lists have been renamed to indexes. Nobody has objected to the names chosen, but one editor has expressed reservation on the approach - he was concerned it would cause confusion by having 2 title standards in place at the same time for these. Though he himself was not confused, nor did he object to the titles. And nobody else has expressed confusion or dissatisfaction with the new titles either. It has been over 2 weeks since the renaming has begun, and since no confusion seems to have been caused, and since there is no opposition to the new names, I plan to continue with the renaming.

Also, one topic list has been merged into its corresponding outline so far: List of transport topics was merged into Outline of transport. It turned out very good. List of cell biology topics is currently being merged into Outline of cell biology (see the link dump in hidden comments at the end of the outline).

I'm not sure how many lists have "topics" in their titles, but Google turned up 788, and these appear to include the ones that have already been renamed to indexes. Subtracting those renamed so far, there are about 500 more to go.

Watching tips

I thought you might want to compare notes on the methods we use to watch over the outlines. Here's how I keep an eye on things...

My watchlist had so many thousands of articles in it that I finally just deleted them all. Now I have it set so that I have to manually add pages to be watched, and I use it only to watch trouble spots and collaborations I'm participating in.

Because I like to watch specific sets of pages at a time, I use "Related changes" on list pages. That way the results are not watered down with edits from pages I'm not immediately concerned with.

I always use WP:POP and Related changes together. With POP installed, you go to a link list, like User:Buaidh/Country outlines of the Americas, then click on "Related changes" in the toolbox menu, and then hover the mouse cursor over the diff and hist links so you can look at those without clicking on them.

It's pretty fast.

The technique turns Wikipedia's list system into a crystal ball.

Update Scanner

Penubag recommends Update Scanner, which is a Firefox add-on that periodically scans pages and pings you when a change is detected. You can even set its level of sensitivity for each scanned page (e.g., "ignore changes of 100 words or less").

I'd use it, but I don't have a computer.  :(

See also WP:OTS for more power tools and techniques, and User:Penubag/optimum toolsets for some more nice addons, that do a variety of things.

I'm always looking for new power tools and power skills, so if you know of any, please share (let me know)!

The Transhumanist 04:48, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

While surveying libraries, their outline-related resources, and our coverage of them, I came across something funny...

What subclass is the Bible in the Library of Congress Classification?

Do you think they'd like this one at WP:DYK?

(Nope. They didn't.)     :)

Libraries

For months, I've been sitting at a terminal in one of the largest libraries in the country, and I haven't even looked around at the available resources.

Until a few days ago.

I'm overwhelmed.

When compared to libraries, Wikipedia is small. (See Digest of Education Statistics 2008, Chapter 7:Libraries and Educational Technology Libraries, and turn to page 617).

But is that a fair comparison?

Yes.

Why?

Because we have growth potential.  :)

And we cover everything, including libraries!

Guess what else I found?

Hunting for outlines

I began to study libraries and librarians, since they are experts in organizing knowledge. And of course I turned to Wikipedia to see what we had on the things I came across...

And while doing so I kept running into outlines on Wikipedia that are not (yet) part of the Outline of knowledge.

When I come across non-OOK outlines, generally I rename them, and reformat them to our standard outline format. But there is the occasional exception.

Here are some outlines I just added:

1. List of energy topics --> Outline of energy (it converted great)
2. List of Dewey Decimal classes --> Outline of Dewey Decimal classes (no conversion)
3. Library of Congress Classification --> ??? (no rename, no conversion)

The last 2 are outlines by their very nature, and so our standard outline subheadings didn't seem to fit. So I left them as is.

I renamed the first 2, but the last one is the name of the outline, that is, the topic itself is an outline, and that outline is presented as the article's content, so I left the name as is. For now. This needs more thought.

Of course, that's not all. Concerning those last 2 outlines above...

Alternate outlines of knowledge

...not only are they outlines, but they are outlines of knowledge! Well, the top few levels, at least.

Uh, so?

What happens if we linkify them?  :)

That is, what happens if we linkify their classifications to Wikipedia's outlines?  :)   :)   :)

They become alternate top ends to the OOK

Yep.

What can you find?

I challenge you to find some "hidden" outlines.

I dare you to take a look around Wikipedia for hidden outlines (that is, outlines not yet hooked into the OOK), and add your kills to WP:WPOOK#The hunt for hidden outlines.

My trophies are already there.

May the hunt begin!

The Transhumanist 20:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

I've been rewriting the Outline article from scratch.

Before I move it to article space, it needs to be finished and completely referenced.

I need your help on it.

The Transhumanist 01:06, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Why do you keep changing this? Its name (according the state) is "Great Seal of Maryland". Mangoe ( talk) 00:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Please see the last sentence of this Executive Order. -- Buaidh ( talk) 13:05, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

When you run into a situation where you aren't allowed to move articles, such as moving a page over an existing page, you need to find a sysop to make the move for you rather than manually cut and paste. Cut and paste moves destroy the edit history of an article.

For example, the edit history for Outline of District of Columbia is in Index of Washington, D.C.-related articles. And the edit history for Index of Washington, D.C.-related articles is in List of Washington, D.C.-related topics.

When you cut and paste move, it creates more work for our sysadmins who have to figure out what you've done and clean it all up. It's easier to just contact an admin and tell 'em what you'd like to accomplish, and they'll do it for you in the correct way.

See WP:MOVE.

We have a couple sysops on our WikiProject. They are Juliancolton and Thehelpfulone. I send them move requests often.

I hope that helps.

The Transhumanist 23:46, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Nice catch on this one (that is, creating it). I totally spaced it when creating the state outlines.

I've added a bunch to it, and bluelinked as many redlinks as I could.

I've added a link to Outline of the District of Columbia to Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge.

The Transhumanist 01:42, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The Outline of Washington has received several tags.

It might be a good idea for us to focus on its development.

The Transhumanist 03:18, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Good for tracking renewable energy coverage for countries:

List of renewable energy topics by country

The Transhumanist 02:43, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I see you are adding See also sections to the Seal of articles. While there is nothing wrong with that, there are a couple problems. First, the link to State of Illinois, for example. You should not use State of because that is excessive, and the link itself is unnecessary because it is already (ar should be) at the top of the article. See WP:SEEALSO. Second, it's great that you're linking to the relevant List of state symbols of article, but it is unneeded to instead link to Symbols of the State of. Not only is the State of part not required, it is silly to link to a redlink and have to create it as a redirect. Just link to the proper article itself. You don't need to go back, but in the future, just keep it simple. Cheers, Reywas92 ^Talk 21:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't think precision is important here. Indiana unambiguously refers to the State of Indiana, and Illinois unambiguously refers to the State of Illinois. No American would ever confuse that with the territory; if refering to the territory, it would say so. If distinction from the territory is necessary, then why doesn't Indiana have a hatnote pointing to Indiana Territory? (And no, that's not a suggestion). In most cases the mention is not historical and completely excessive. When in a see also link it is especially unambiguous; it's not necessary to say State of Indiana when it just redirects to Indiana; anyway, what if you mean both in general? The creation of redirects is style and has nothing to do with the naming. Why make new redirects when you can just use a piped link? ([[List of state symbols of Indiana|Symbols of the State of Indiana]]) And can I have a reference that all legal statues must refer to states with "State of" or "Commonwealth of"? If that's true, it's interesting; I think it may just be a formality. Reywas92 ^Talk 22:32, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Development is moving steadily forward. We haven't created any new outlines lately, but a lot of editing of our existing outlines is taking place. Take a look at Buaidh's contributions.  :)

I'm impressed.

I can safely say we now have another fanatic working on the project.

Importance of watching

A big danger to new pages or pages that have low traffic are prods. These are deletion proposals that don't have to go through AfD. If a prod sits on a page, any page, 5 days without opposition, the page can be deleted without discussion.

Such pages can be undeleted without discussion too, but there's usually a delay, especially if you don't notice the page missing right away. Prods create undesirable gaps in the subject coverage of list sets.

I just caught one the other day, so keep an eye on the outline pages!

Tangent: Indexes

One of the benefits of reverse outlining is the discovery of problems (gaps in coverage, etc.) with the publication being outlined. We've come across several and have been fixing those as we go. Because hypertext tables of contents are only as good as the pages they link to, we've been cleaning up large sections of Wikipedia. This was something I did not foresee when I started this project.

One of the sets of pages we link to on the outlines is the set of indexes, formerly called "List of x topics". Unfortunately, the lists of topics were divided between 2 different sets competing for the same article names, and this impeded development of both sets. One of those sets were indexes, and the rest are outlines (more about these below).

So I set about splitting up the 2 sets, by renaming the indexes to "Index of x articles" or "Index of x-related articles".

All 450 or so of them.

Nobody has complained about the new names, but 2 or 3 people thought I was way too bold to attempt this without a proposal or discussion first. Just 2 or 3 people. That's about as much opposition as you could expect for moving a single page.

Not bad for a move of this volume.

There are many more indexes out there, but our main concern are those which are provided links on the outlines. Many of those are redlinks (gaps in coverage as mentioned above), and so we need a way to track these and direct editor attention to them so that somebody creates them...

So, I've created a page for the set, that parallels the OOK list:

See Portal:Contents/Index.

The complete list of "Index of" articles can be found at User:The Transhumanist/Index, and this list needs to be gone over to make sure each article index listed is included on the portal page above. If you help with this, please put - placed after each entry that you check and place.

Thank you.

To further support the development of index pages, and provide a central place for people to go to find out more about indexes and what needs to be done, I've created the Index WikiProject.

Hidden outlines

There are outline pages hiding all over Wikipedia. They aren't in OOK's formats, but we can fix that.  :)

Converting existing outlines and absorbing them into the OOK is a lot easier than creating outlines from scratch, and it avoids unnecessary duplication of effort. But before we can convert them, we have to find them...

A hunt is underway for non-OOK outlines. So far, User:Gimme danger is in the lead and has found the most. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#The hunt for hidden outlines for more information.

Please don't rename any non-standard outlines you come across to OOK's standard naming until after you reformat them. Renaming them only after they are reformatted helps us keep track of which outlines have and have not been converted.

Thank you.

Converting outlines

The way I usually do this is by substituting the relevant outline generator template at the beginning of the outline, which forces the existing outline to the bottom of the page. Then I add an "under construction" tag, and then move all the links from the original outline to the relevant sections in the standard structure. It is important to finish the conversion quickly, so as not to create confusion. Then I scour Wikipedia for missing links (using Google to do a site-specific search of Wikipedia), to make the upgraded outline more comprehensive than the converted outline. Be sure to check all related categories too. Add a lead paragraph, add external links, and voila!

Better than before.

Where we're heading

The next phase in the evolution of this project is to increase participation by expanding the Wikipedia community's awareness of the Outline of knowledge, its purpose, and what needs to be done for any given subject.

This will entail placing banners on the outlines' talk pages, the talk page for the WikiProject associated with the subject of each outline and of each planned outline, and on the talk page of each article corresponding to each outline and to each planned outline.

Then instructions on improving subject access, including the creation and development of an outline for each subject, will be posted on every related WikiProject page. (There's a WikiProject for the subject of most outlines).

We will also be sending notices to every member of every WikiProject associated with the subject of each and every outline and planned outline.

But before this happens, the outline guidelines and the article draft for the topic "Outline" must be completed. Without these, many editors will not know what an outline is, or what to do to build and improve them.

And that's our current bottleneck.

Once those are ready (the guideline and article), we can take this project to the next level.

Keep up the good work

Well, that's all for now.

Until next time,

The Transhumanist 23:30, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi Buaidh,

I got the idea of posting to all members of related WikiProjects from your mention of the 112 members of the country WikiProject.

But we can't contact them until the outline guidelines and outline article are completed.

Without those, the confusion and questions will be too much to handle.

The Transhumanist 23:41, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

What are the benefits of a tree structure?

The article doesn't say.

I'm interested, because I need to explain the benefits in the guideline on outlines I'm writing. (Outlines are a type of tree structure).

I've also asked the question at various reference desks, and these threads may help to jump start your brain on this question.  :)

• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science#What are the benefits of a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics#What are the benefits to humans of using a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities#In the humanities, what are the applications and benefits of a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language#What are the benefits of using tree structures in linguistic communications?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous#With respect to the fields covered by this refdesk, what are the applications and benefits of a tree structure?

What are the benefits of outlines, over and above regular articles?

What benefits have you noticed?

How are Wikipedia's outlines useful to you?

I look forward to your answers on my talk page.

The Transhumanist 04:50, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi. As a participant of the WP:Energy, I would like to ask you to comment the request for tagging WP:Energy articles by bot. The list of potential categories for tagging is located here and the discussion about which categories should be excluded from this list, is going on at the WP:Energy talkpage here. Your comments are welcome. Beagel ( talk) 12:07, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

I thought it might be a good idea to run a contest or two through the Countries WikiProject to attract editors to improve country coverage on Wikipedia, especially the country outlines.

I noticed you are a member of the WikiProject, and was wondering if you could help.

I've posted a message at Countries WikiProject talk page to get discussion started on what the awards programs should be and how they should be run.

Your ideas and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The Transhumanist 23:14, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

The History of California is supposed to be an article.

Instead it is a list that falls within the scope of Historical outline of California.

I thought you might be interested in merging it into your outline.

Then the history section of the California article could be split off to the article "History of California" per Wikipedia's summary style guideline.

The Transhumanist 23:23, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Maybe...

We've started the next phase

I was experiencing mental block on the article draft for "outline" and on the outline guideline draft. And this was holding the whole project back. Without these (which are intended to explain the type of lists known as outlines in detail), the danger is higher that a controversy could go the wrong way.

I requested help on them, but there was none forthcoming.

So I went ahead and started us on the next phase of operations without those 2 pages...

Our AWB'ers and I have placed about 1600 notices all over Wikipedia. And the plan is to place several thousand more.

This generated only one complaint, but it was a very vocal one, and attracted a few other detractors who seemed unfamiliar with the concept of hierarchical outlines and their benefits. However, just as many or more editors came to the defense of the OOK, and there was no consensus formed. But, dab is still trying to rally opposition to outlines at the Village Pump. See below...

Administrator noticeboard incident and Village Pump policy discussion

It appears that the banner placed on the talk page of the Outline of Switzerland caught the attention of an editor named Dbachmann who posted a rather forceful message on my talk page, another on WT:WPOOK, another at WP:VPP, and still another at WP:AN!

He went well out of his way to use negative hype to cause a stir.

It appears that Mr. Bachmann doesn't understand the nature of hierarchical outlines and their applications. And though he implied that he has never seen an OOK outline before, he was involved with a discussion on these when they were called "lists of basic topics".

His primary argument is that outlines are content forks of articles, and violate WP:CFORK.

But "topic lists", of which outlines are a type, have been around for almost as long as Wikipedia, and fall under the WP:LISTS and WP:STAND guidelines. They aren't intended as forks, as they are lists, bringing the benefits of lists to the corresponding subjects, such as grouping and navigation.

Someone suggested an MfD, but lists are articles, and are within the jurisdiction of AfD. Only the portal page, which merely lists the outline articles, falls within the scope of the MfD department.

The administrator's noticeboard was considered the wrong venue for the discussion, and the discussion was closed.

But Dab's discussion at the Village Pump is still active. Hopefully level heads will prevail there too.

Now what?

Am I disheartened or deterred? Hell no. I say "full steam ahead!"

But we really need to finish the article draft and the guideline. Otherwise there will continue to be confusion.

Over the next week or two, we'll be posting another 1600 or so notices. It's a good thing we didn't send out 10,000 of them all at once.  :)

The Transhumanist 23:45, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Another related thread has popped up at WP:VPR#OoK's expediency. --TT   04:34, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Input on the OOK threads at the Village Pump has died down (at both WP:VPP and WP:VPR), and there is currently no consensus on either.

Negative feedback

For the number of notices we posted (over a thousand) the number of complaints we received (the two VP threads mentioned above) was quite low.

Silent majority

Considering most of the outlines are orphans, they get pretty good use.

Note that people who are happy with articles on Wikipedia generally don't say anything, so I simply interpret it as positive feedback.

Traffic, traffic comparison, and increasing traffic

Using Traffic, I compare the traffic of articles, their corresponding outlines, and their corresponding portals from time to time.

Outlines are starting to catch up to portals. Though the main portals, which are included in a navbar menu at the top of most portals are still way ahead of their outline counterparts.

Both outlines and portals are way behind the articles on the same subjects. Articles usually have 20 to 30 times the traffic.

Keep in mind that most outlines are orphans, with the primary link to them being Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge.

Traffic should improve once we include links on the corresponding subject pages, including the main subject as well as subjects that correspond to subheadings (e.g., History of x, and in the case of countries: Geography of x, Demographics of x, Culture of x, etc.)

I'm convinced the traffic of outlines will overtake portals once we've link-integrated them into the encyclopedia. And since outlines serve as tables of contents for each subject, it seems most fitting to place links to them in the form of hatnotes at the top of each subject's main articles (and the sub-subjects mentioned in the paragraph directly above).

By the way, there's another traffic counter called Wikirank, but I haven't tested it out much yet, but will do so in the coming weeks.

Going for the Main Page

Once the traffic of outlines has overtaken portals, it will be time to replace portals on the Main Page, even if we need to spearhead a new main page redesign! This isn't a far-fetched idea. I was the one who jumpstarted and led the project responsible for the current main page design (until it hit critical mass and attracted other leaders), and I was also the most active editor on that project. I even created the WP:CBB on the Community Portal to promote the main page election. The second time around should be easier.

Back to the here and now

Targetting the Main Page is a few months off.

Right now, we need to continue posting notices and start link-integrating the OOK into the encyclopedia.

I have a whole slew of AWB tasks to assign. I hope you are ready.  :)

Spread the word

WP:WPOOK needs members. Tell all your friends about the OOK, and get them to join.

The Transhumanist 02:43, 27 May 2009

Wikipedia:Outlines was growing so large that I split this section off as a separate page.

I look forward to your feedback and improvements.

The Transhumanist 22:31, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi. I was wondering if you'd seen our Lists of timelines#Geographical timelines? Specifically Timeline of United States history (and subpages), which could probably be well-merged with your excellent Historical outline of the United States.

I'm also wondering if perhaps the contents of Template:US historical outlines might be better considered/renamed as timelines, rather than historical outlines...?

Just some early morning thoughts :) -- Quiddity ( talk) 09:55, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

My head is spinning. The Transhumanist 03:21, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

The big push continues.

And it seems to be working!

The good news is that there's growing support for outlines, and there are more editors than ever editing them!

The bad news is that the complainers are disproportionately represented on the project's various talk pages. While many editors work diligently on the front end, a handful of complainers are trying to tear down the project behind the scenes. Fortunately, barely enough supporters have been watching those pages that no consensus for moving or merging the outlines has succeeded. So far...

Big problem: ignorance of what outlines are for and their benefits

Most of the opposition seems to be unaware of the complete range of what outlines are used for. They just don't get it.

This is why it is important to complete the outline article draft. An article with a comprehensive treatment of outlines would be the perfect place to refer anybody unfamiliar with outlines to.

Opposers also don't seem to understand how outlines differ from some other page type that they prefer. Some think articles are good enough as an overview, others think portals are more in-depth, still others think categories or navigation boxes are the most efficient and useful way to organize and present topical information. Some have simply never seen an "Outline of" page before and think they are a new type of page (they've been around under other names since 2001).

If you run across anyone who doesn't understand the role of outlines on Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Why do we have outlines in addition to...? might help reduce their misconceptions or uncertainties about outlines.

On the bright side, you've got to see this...

To add the outlines and related support pages to your watchlist (takes less than 30 seconds), cut and paste them from Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist into your raw watchlist. For a way to improve the display of your watchlist - by namespace (very useful) - see Watchlist sorter, or use the "super fast upgrade" at WP:OTS.

Or go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist using Related changes (currently without the talk pages) and click on "Related changes" in the toolbox menu on the sidebar on the left side of your screen.

The big push

The big push started with about a thousand banners and notices being placed on article talk pages all over Wikipedia.

But it didn't stop there...

Welcome our new members...

The following Wikipedians have joined the OOK team.

Be sure to stop by their talk pages and introduce yourselves.

• Tarheel95 - going after the Main Page.
• Vivio Testarossa / Feinoha - here to help.
• Burningview - made a splash at MfD with Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Drafts/Outline of British Columbia (see the talk page for the MfD link - lots of support there).

Enter the mentors!

I asked a bunch of mentors at WP:ADOPT for advice. Several of them answered on my talk page. Most of those who replied were happy to help, and posted some very good ideas. A couple even joined the project.

Here are their ideas, and what is being done about them. A few of the tasks still need volunteers:

• Strdst grl: Create and place project banners - already  Done
• Strdst grl & The Earwig: put an animated ad for the project in WP:BANNER - Our graphics specialist Penubag is looking into it.
• Strdst grl: Create a userbox for the project - assigned to Penubag.
• Garden: Ask to have outlines added to next year's WikiCup competition -  Done (proposal posted)
• Tarheel95: Add a link to Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge to the Main Page - Tarheel95 is taking on the creation of the proposal
• SriMesh: Create an outreach subpage to WPOOK -  Done (invitation coming soon, see below)
• SriMesh: (Create a newsletter archive subpage) -  Done
• SriMesh: Add a feed to AlexNewArtBot to gather links to new outlines and post them on a page. Then personally invite new creators to the project. - who wants to tackle the feed?
• SriMesh: Assign someone to monitor the outlines via watchlist, and invite new outline editors to the project - any volunteers?
• Related: Create an invitation - Penubag is working on it.
• SriMesh: Create Template:Expand outline similar to Template:Expand list, which adds each outline it is posted on to Category:Incomplete outlines, where editors (who are browsing the categories) can find them and work on them - to be assigned
• SriMesh: Add the above template to incomplete outlines - upcoming AWB task
• The Earwig: "Tell your wikifriends about it" - I've told mine, have you told yours?
• The Earwig: "Collaborate with other WikiProjects" - we've been doing this from the start (each outline is associated with at least one other WikiProject).
• : move the projected outline to a subpage of WP:WPOOK -  Done

Linking to outlines has begun

To the tops of about 30 subject articles, I placed a test batch of hatnotes leading to the corresponding outlines. The hatnotes look like this:

For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of X.(Hidden: <!- PLEASE LEAVE THIS LINE IN PLACE because it leads to the page that serves as the table of contents for Wikipedia's overall coverage of this subject. Thank you.-->

The rationale for the hatnotes is that each outline is a topical guide for its subject, and since tables of contents go at the front of a book, a link to each outline should be placed at the front of its subject.

Unfortunately, not all editors agree. Some of the hatnotes have already disappeared.  :(

Some past discussions pertaining to the existence or location of outlines

Note that the "Lists of topics" are of two types, including outlines and indexes, so discussions to remove, move, or merge those are usually relevant to the OOK. Also, outlines are a type of list, so discussions that affect lists in general also pertain to outlines. We've got to be on our toes!

• Wikipedia:Move navigational lists to portal namespace
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Islamic and Muslim related topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of South Africa
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic visual arts and design topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic mining topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic management topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic industrial topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic computer science topics
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of basic Canada topics
• User talk:The Transhumanist/Archive 21#Question copied from Juliancolton's page
• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Drafts/Outline of British Columbia
• Talk:Switzerland#Orphaned article: Outline of Switzerland
• Outline of science converted to redirect by Dbachmann
• Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 64#"Outlines"
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive193#Shadow Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 47#OoK's expediency

I've excluded links to live discussions, out of respect for WP:CANVASS.

Table of contents to OOK-related stuff

Here's a directory of outline support pages:

• Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge
• Wikipedia:Lists
  • WP:CLN
  • Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists
    • Wikipedia:Outlines
      • Why do we have outlines in addition to...?
      • Comparison of Wikipedia's and Britannica's outlines of knowledge
• WP:WPOOK
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Projected outline

Keep up the great work!

The Transhumanist 03:21, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

A tag has been placed on Historical outlines by US state requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an article with no content whatsoever, or whose contents consist only of external links, "See also" section, book reference, category tag, template tag, interwiki link, rephrasing of the title, or an attempt to contact the subject of the article. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{ hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. Beeblebrox ( talk) 20:21, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Penubag needs feedback.

I've posted a few changes for him to make to it.

Please post additional comments and suggestions for him at User talk:Penubag#Chocolate banner.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 02:03, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

As you know, Penubag is working on a banner to advertise the Outline WikiProject. And he's almost done.

The banner prominently presents the "Outline of chocolate", which of course will become the most widely advertised outline as soon as the banner goes live. The first thing many editors will do after seeing the banner is look for that outline.

The problem is, we don't have one.

So that's our first outline collaboration!

I started a draft this morning.

It needs to be finished and moved to the article namespace before we can start using Penubag's banner ad!

Come join in on the fun. It's chocolate!

The Transhumanist 21:46, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I went through and cleaned up the Outline of Texas so that it a) made more sense for Texas-related topics, b) fit with the various MOS guidelines better, and c) didn't completely duplicate Historical outline of Texas. You've now twice reverted my changes without discussion. Are these outline articles not supposed to be touched? Karanacs ( talk) 14:50, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Hey, come on, quit it with the rhetorical questions. Please ask real questions, like, "what is your rationale for including the whole history outline in that section?"

Should the pages be merged, pulling the whole history outline into that section?

Or should we have a single link in the section?

If not, what should be included?

What do you guys think?

The Transhumanist 20:12, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Buaidh, Karanacs posted another thread concerning these pages at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#MOS.

Out of curiosity, do you use Google for site-specific article title searches of Wikipedia?

• "of" and "Texas"

• "in" and "Texas"

• "for" and "Texas"

• with "Texas" not at the end

I find this approach very useful for identifying articles on Wikipedia about a specific region.

The Transhumanist 20:48, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: to contact or reply to me, please use my talk page, because it triggers Wikipedia's auto alert feature. I forget about threads otherwise. Thank you.

The History of California is a list.

Do you think it should be merged into Historical outline of California?

The Transhumanist 23:36, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

No. The History of California became so long that it was split into several articles and only links to those articles remain at History of California. Hopefully, the article will be expanded to include a synopsis of the History of California (probably by someone like me.) I recommend that we retain the article so that it can become that synopsis. -- Buaidh ( talk) 13:56, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. See WP:SS. The Transhumanist 21:08, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I've converted most of it. The first two subsections still need work, and the article needs a lead paragraph.

The Transhumanist 22:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Is it perfect? Can it be improved?

Penubag loves feedback. Please let him know if it can be further improved.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 22:53, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I have nominated Set index articles (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) for discussion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. œ ^™ 01:42, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Several members of the WikiProject have been hard at work.

Buaidh has been building and refining the outlines on the U.S. States, the states' historical outlines, and the Historical outline of the United States. Lately, his edits have dominated the project's watchlist readout.

Penubag has been working on medals for all the main branches of the OOK, and has completed the OOK WikiProject's animated advert banner (see below).

Highfields has been filling in the currencies for each country on their respective outlines.

NuclearWarfare and Thehelpfulone have been busy with WP:AWB, posting banners and notices, and helping our sister project, the Index WikiProject, get established. Indexes work hand-in-hand with the outlines and are prominently linked to from the top of most of them. And the outlines, which serve as tables of contents, are only as good as the pages they link to.

Since we started integrating (linking) the OOK and its support pages into the encyclopedia and into the Wikipedia community, activity on outlines has been increasing. Though there's still much left to do.

But I digress. There are a couple more...

Welcome our new members! Stefan and MacMed

User talk:Stefan is building the Outline of sharks.

User talk:MacMed has joined our advanced wiki-tools team, and is currently adding links to outlines in the corresponding subject articles' see also sections.

Be sure to stop by their talk pages and say "hi".

WPOOK's advert banner has gone live!

Penubag has finished this WikiProject's animated advert banner, and it is now being displayed on the Wikipedia ads template which in turn is displayed on about 2000 user pages. Each time someone access one of those pages, there is a 1 in 184 chance of them viewing this:

Wikipedia ads	file info – #184

If you'd like to display the banner on your userpage locked-on to the ad as above, use the following code:

{{Wikipedia ads|ad=184}}

(By the way, it's been awhile since we've barnstarred Penubag).

Watchers needed!

If you haven't already, please add the entire project's watchlist to your watchlist. Here's how:

From the edit window, copy and paste Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist into your raw watchlist.

Or go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist using Related changes and click on "Related changes" in the toolbox menu in Wikipedia's sidebar on the left hand side of the screen.

Check the watchlist every time you log on!

I forgot to mention this step above.  :)

The OOK is in 5 other Wikipedias?

I can't make heads or tails of 'em, but these links were on Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge:

• ar:ويكيبيديا:مواضيع أساسية
• fa:پورتال:فهرست موضوعات پایه
• pl:Przegląd dziedzin wiedzy
• pt:Portal:Conteúdo/Esboço do conhecimento
• zh-yue:基礎課題表清單

Resurrected from the grave yard...

I discovered an AfD discussion on possibly the first article named "Outline of", which was called Outline of Islamic and Muslim related topics, and which was created 4 years ago. Of course they deleted it. But now it has many friends, and so it has risen from the dead.  :)

See the DRV discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2009 June 7#Outline of Islamic and Muslim related topics.

A diamond buried in project space

• When G716 found the page "Learn" tucked away as a subpage of the Probability WikiProject, he thought "This deserves to be in the article space", and moved it to the encyclopedia. See Outline of probability.

Recruiting

Recruiters needed. Drop me a note if you are interested.

Advice from the mentors

• Astatine-210, Strdst grl, and Willscrlt - link to the outlines from the corresponding subject articles' see also sections - this is underway by MacMed (non-country outlines) and User talk:NuclearWarfare (counry outlines).
• Astatine-210 - add a link to the outlines to the disambiguation pages of the corresponding subjects - good idea. Since "Outline" is just the type of page, not the subject, I think these might qualify for inclusion on disambiguation pages. We need someone to look into the relevant guidelines on this.
• User talk:SimonTrew - provide a badge (userbox) for WPOOK members to add to their user pages - Penubag will have one for us soon.
• Zachary crimsonwolf - create a card explaining outlines, and send it to everyone you know, and make it viral (by including a request for the recipients to send the card to everyone they know) - this task has been split in three:

1. Creation of a "thank you for your interest" card which introduces (explains) outlines, to send to queriers, new participants to discussions, those who seem to be confused about outlines, etc.
2. Creation of a thank you card / invitation to the WPOOK, to send to users we see working on outlines, including a request for them to invite others whom they think might be interested

• weebiloobil - contact Wikignomes - OK...

3. Creation of an invitation to Wikignomes, with a brief rundown on the types of tasks there are for them to do on the outlines. The invitation will include a request for them to invite anyone they think would enjoy working on outlines.

• weebiloobil - add examples to Wikipedia:Outlines - more examples will be added as suitable outlines are completed
• weebiloobil - add a picture to Wikipedia:Outlines (it doesn't have to be relevant), to provide atmosphere and to break it up visually and add a splash of color - will do, and we'll add a caption to make it relevant, with a link to the outline on that subject. Thank you for the idea.
• Zachary crimsonwolf - ask Jimbo Wales to bestow the award(s) for the country outlines contest, once you get it going first - we'll give that a try
• Zachary crimsonwolf - ask everyone in the project to inform their acquaintances around Wikipedia about the OOK - will do, as soon as the cards
• UzEE - collaborate with all the WikiProjects you share scope with - we've placed a banner on their talk pages, and have placed task notices on some. We'll be posting more tasks, and plan to create a section on contents system development and maintenance for each WikiProject page itself.
• SriMesh - if you can't get outlines added to next year's WikiCup, then create your own WikiCup-like contest - there's 6 months left to this year to address reservations and work out the details at WikiCup. In the meantime, there's the 200-WikiProject contest, which needs input.

More outline tasks

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Drafts/Outline of chocolate draft - our current outline collaboration!
• Outline of psychology - someone moved a big chunk of this article to the talk page, leaving a big gap in the outline. Editors are needed to add subheadings and links.
• See also links - add {{main|Outline of x}} (where "x" is the subject) to the see also section of the corresponding subject article of each outline

New outlines in article space

• Outline of sharks - under construction in article space
• Outline of Hinduism (converted from "List of Hinduism-related topics")

New outline drafts

• Outline of chocolate
• Outline of Christianity

Main discussion pages

• Wikipedia talk:Outlines
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Outline of knowledge
• Portal talk:Contents/Outline of knowledge

Keep up the great work

I'm impressed with the level of enthusiasm and work going into the outlines. I'm proud to be working with each of you.

The Transhumanist 21:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

This outline is approaching completion.

I added a bunch more links, finding them with the following Google site-specific searches of Wikipedia:

• "of" and "Gibraltar"

• "in" and "Gibraltar"

• "for" and "Gibraltar"

• with "Gibraltar" not at the end

(You can use the wikicode for the links above as the basis for new searches - just replace "Gibraltar" with any other country or region name).

The redlinks need to be bluelinked where possible. The most useful way is to create redirects leading to the material (which is usually included in a section of an article - see Wikipedia:Redirect#Redirects to page sections. That way, when the redirect pages are replaced by the actual articles, the links will already point to the right places.

Please take a crack at it, and bluelink a few.

Thank you.

Good luck.

Have fun.

The Transhumanist 00:26, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

That was fun.  :)

The Transhumanist 23:27, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I admire your enthusiam, but please conform to policy. The most easily recognised name for an English-speaking reader is Christopher Columbus, whatever you may wish it to be. Philip Trueman ( talk) 19:40, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Work is proceeding apace...

• Julian is working on getting a bot account (and he delivered this update as his trial run).
• Penubag is working on the Project page and upcoming contest.
• Buaidh is developing all of the U.S. state historical outlines.
• Tarheel95 is writing a proposal to add a link to the Main Page leading to the the OOK.
• Highfields is integrating the OOK into the encyclopedia by deorphanizing outlines by placing a {{ main}} link in the see also section of the subject articles that have a corresponding outline.
• I've been trying to keep up with them.  :)

New members

• Minnecologies - developing Outline of forestry and is watching the big picture.
• Mnation2 - improving Outline of Lebanon

Hatnotes

The current consensus is that we can't place a hatnote leading to an outline at the top of a subject articles unless the outline being presented is of at least the same quality-level as the article.

What's next...

Improve outline quality by completing them.

Place hatnotes for the outlines of high enough quality.

Guidelines pertaining to outlines need to be updated. Outlines emerged as a class of pages only a few months ago, and most of the relevant guidelines don't cover them specifically. For example, Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists is incredibly out of date.

Invite wikignomes, wikielves, and wikifairies (all 2500+ of them) to help on the outlines .

Identify 600 more subjects with coverage extensive enough to justify outlines, create rudimentary drafts for them, and post notices to the corresponding WikiProjects and subject talk pages to help build them.

Convert outlines titled "List of" to outline articles, and add them to the OOK. There are a few hundred of these. Conversion instructions are needed.

Add a description of outlines to About Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Basic navigation, and add tips about outlines to the WP:TOTD and Tips library.

Keep up the great work!

The Transhumanist 20:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Right now, the biggest problem concerning outlines is the government branches sections of the country outlines. (Executive, Legislative, Judicial).

The data was generated by template (to save time), but a lot of countries didn't match the standard data, and for those the government branches sections need to be fixed.

For each country, the relevant information can usually be found at Politics of x or Government of x.

Concerning the OOK, this task is the highest priority.

The Transhumanist 17:20, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: the government section of the country outlines can be easily accessed from User:The Transhumanist/List of country outline government sections.

Minnecologies has done an incredible amount of work on Outline of forestry and posted a note to me on my talk page requesting feedback.

I've posted my observations at Talk:Outline of forestry#Finished outline review.

Please take a look at the outline and let Minnecologies know what you think of it on the outline's talk page.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 19:37, 29 June 2009 (UTC) Delivered by JCbot ( talk) at 20:14, 29 June 2009 (UTC).

I noticed your recent edits in the international organisation membership part of Outline of knowledge.

I think increasing the number beyond (say) the 10 most important ones is a clear example of going beyond the essential topics. For example for the Netherlands, the list consisted of over 70! such organisations after your edit. Arnoutf ( talk) 20:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for taking this so well and being cooperative/proactive in following up. I am more into Netherlands articles than in Outlines; that and real life work is keeping my hands full so sorry, I won't be investing a lot of time in the Outline project. Arnoutf ( talk) 18:40, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I've done a further split and moved the unabbreviated version of the list to International organization membership of the Netherlands. There's no reason why a block of abbreviations couldn't be included in this outline (because that wouldn't take up much room), with the main organizations broken out at the top. The Transhumanist 00:13, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I like the 2-column format you've been applying. The Transhumanist 00:35, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I've been fighting battles concerning outlines for the past 3 days. Every now and then, I checked my watchlist and saw you working like mad on the outlines. For me, that made the battles worth fighting.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 00:42, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry that I haven't been available to assign tasks lately. For the past 3 days (not including today) I've been almost totally consumed in discussions concerning the location and very existence of outlines. Today I finally broke free and got back to work on outlines. Felt good.

A great deal has been happening with outlines and behind the scenes. I just don't have time to tell you all about it this time around. Here's the best I can do...

How to watch what's going on with outlines

If you'd like a bird's eye view of everything that's happening with respect to outlines, see this page:

• WP:OOKWL - watchlist for copying and pasting into your raw watchlist.

Or go to these pages (and click on "Related changes" in the sidebar's toolbox menu):

• WP:OOKRC - a version of the above watchlist for use with "Related changes".
• WP:OOKDIR - a list of key pages related to the OOK, along with their shortcuts.
• WP:OOKDISC - list of discussions pertaining to outlines.

Recently converted to outlines

These outline articles, which were named "List of...", have been converted to an OOK format:

• Outline of martial arts (was "List of martial arts-related topics")
• Outline of wine - converted by Stefan (was called "List of wine-related topics")
• Outline of the creation-evolution controversy (was "List of topics in the creation-evolution controversy")
• Outline of actuarial science (was "Actuarial topics")
• Outline of industrial organization (was "List of topics in industrial organization")

Recently merged into outlines

There are a lot of "List of" articles that are outlines. Some of them are on the same subjects as the "Outline of" articles. The following one have been recently merged:

• List of finance topics into Outline of finance

The Transhumanist 01:14, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't think of making this list sooner, but at least it will be useful for doublechecking the sections...

• User:The Transhumanist/List of country outline international organization membership sections

By the way...

By copying and pasting this list to a new page, and then using the search/replace feature of WP:WikEd, you can make new sections link lists on the fly. Just another trick for your bag o' tricks.

Keep up the excellent work.

The Transhumanist 17:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

You've done a fantastic job on the international organization membership sections. Keep up the excellent work.

I've completed adding country and state outline links to the corresponding country and state articles' "See also" sections.

Now I'm working on the "See also" sections for the rest of the outlines. Once that's done, all of the outlines will be linked into from the encyclopedia (article space). This will increase traffic to the outlines, and as the OOK gets better integrated into the encyclopedia, traffic to them should increase further still.

This makes the quality of the outlines of utmost importance...

The government sections of the country outlines are still most in need of improvement, since many of the government branches sections are in blatant error: with the wrong links! Fixing these sections is the absolute highest priority.

When you are done with international organizations, please continue on to the government branches sections - most but not all countries have an executive, a legislative, and a judicial branch. The information for them is usually located in the Politics of x article for each country.

I appreciate the massive amount of effort you've put into these, and I cannot thank you enough.

The project would slow down to a crawl without you.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist 18:32, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

You mentioned that the table for the United States population estimates for MSAs is downloaded directly from the Census site. How is this done seeing that the 2009 numbers are out and the data in the table isn't reflected so.-- UtahStizzle ( talk) 00:46, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for the clarification. And yes, 2008. —Preceding unsigned comment added by UtahStizzle ( talk • contribs) 01:38, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Ponca City, OK μSA. Since you had some involvement with the Ponca City, OK μSA redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion (if you have not already done so). Rockfang ( talk) 22:08, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Phase two of outline integration (de-orphanizing outlines by adding links leading to them into article see also sections) is nearly complete. The better that outlines are integrated into the encyclopedia, the more use they will be to readers.

Due to greater exposure through outline integration, and with most of the OOK team on school summer vacation, development activity on outlines has increased a lot...

New members

Be sure to welcome our newest members to the team:

• Tiamut
• Mandsford

News: Outline of Palestine survives AfD

The outline was nominated for deletion for being too general in scope. The consensus was overwhelmingly for keeping it.

The most memorable comment was posted by Mandsford: I like the poetic name, anyway. [Outline of Palestine]. "Master Plan of Pakistan" and "Rough Sketch of Bangladesh" would be good too.

Special thanks to Tiamut for greatly improving the outline, and helping to save it from AfD.

To keep track of outline AfDs and other outline-related discussions, see WP:OOKDISC.

Who's active on Wikipedia this summer?

Courtesy of Rich Farmbrough, here's a list of editors by their edit counts over the previous month (8th June to 8th July).

It would be nice to get the most prolific Wikipedians involved with WP:WPOOK. If you can, find a good reason to contact one or more of them, and invite them to work on a relevant outline - or all 500!

Who's been up to what?

• Buaidh, Highfields, and Gimme danger have been working on the government sections of the country outlines. Being that there are about 240 of these, with critical information being filled in on each, this is by far the hardest and most important chore of this WikiProject right now.
• Penubag is working on a redesign of the top OOK page.
• Tiamut has done an incredible job developing the Outline of Palestine.
• And kudos also go to Eu.stefan for his work on Outline of Buddhism.

Thank you.

Here's what else has been going on...

New outlines

Recently created outlines include:

• Outline of England - TT
• Outline of Scotland - TT
• Outline of Buddhism - Eu.stefan
• Outline of ancient Greece - TT

Recently converted to outlines

These outline articles, which were named "List of...", have been converted to an OOK format and added to the OOK:

• Outline of the Vietnam War - was "List of Vietnam War-related topics" - TT
• Outline of combinatorics - was "List of combinatorics topics" - converted by Minnecologies
• Outline of category theory - was "List of category theory topics" converted by Minnecologies
• Outline of scientific method - was "List of scientific method topics" - TT
• Outline of ancient Rome - was "List of topics related to ancient Rome" - TT

Recently merged into outlines

There are a lot of "List of" articles that are outlines. Some of them are on the same subjects as the "Outline of" articles. The following articles have been recently merged into OOK pages:

• List of finance topics into Outline of finance - TT
• List of England-related topics into Outline of England - TT

Outlines that have been tagged

Tags are requests to fix a problem or improve an article in a particular way. Unless we want the tags to sit there for an extended period of time cluttering up the outlines (we don't), it is up to us to fulfill those requests or attend to underlying misassumptions (if any).

• Outline of literature - tagged as Original research
• Outline of ancient Greece - tagged as under construction
• Outline of mathematics - tagged as in need of attention from an expert
• Outline of arithmetic - tagged as not citing any references or sources.
• Outline of immunology - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of organic chemistry - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of psychology - tagged as in need of attention from an expert on the subject
• Outline of family and consumer science - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of energy storage - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of nuclear technology - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of ergonomics - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of construction - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of machines - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of free software - tagged as an orphan
• Outline of design - tagged as containing original research or unverified claims, and needing references or sources
• Outline of automobiles - tagged as an orphan

I can't stress enough the importance of watching

With so many outlines (now over 500), and a growing number of support pages (guidelines, wikiproject pages, etc.), I can no longer keep up. I need your help watching over it all.

If you'd like to omnisciently view everything "from above", see this page:

• WP:OOKWL - watchlist for copying and pasting into your raw watchlist.

Or go to these pages (and click on "Related changes" in the sidebar's toolbox menu):

• WP:OOKRC - a version of the above watchlist for use with "Related changes".
• WP:OOKDIR - a list of key pages related to the OOK, along with their shortcuts.
• WP:OOKDISC - list of discussions pertaining to outlines.

What's next?

There are a lot of contradictions in guidelines related to outlines. I'll be turning my attention to fixing those.

The number of "Outline of" articles is rapidly catching up to portals, and will probably pass them by the end of the summer!

Keep up the excellent work.

The Transhumanist 00:40, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Delivered by – Juliancolton |  ^Talk at 21:40, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

		The Wikipedian known as Buaidh is hereby recognized by his peers as a Wikipedia World Developer, for his exemplary and extensive work on the outline articles of every country of the world and of every state of the United States (including the creation of a historical outline for every state), and for greatly improving Wikipedia's Outline of Knowledge. Presented on this, the 4th day of August 2009, by    — The Transhumanist   ,  penubag , Willscrlt, NW, Gimme danger, Minnecologies, Stefan, Sswonk, – Juliancolton, MacMed, +sj +, Highfields, Tarheel95, Rich Farmbrough, The Earwig, Quiddity, and at -210

You are doing a wonderful job. Thank you, Buaidh.

The Transhumanist 00:45, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Wow! Applause! -- œ ^™ 02:10, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi, The Transhumanist instructed me to create and build an Outline of James Bond and I have at User:Highfields/sandbox. However, some people obejected when I moved it to the mainspace. It was suggested I get someone else to do it for me, so I was wondering, if your not too busy, if you could simply move User:Highfields/sandbox and it's relevant talk-page to Outline of James Bond then I'll delete the redirect.

If you could I would be most greatful,

Highfields ( talk, contribs) 11:53, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

(ps. Well done on the WP:WPOOK award, you deserve it)

I've been working off-and-on linking the outlines into the encyclopedia.

I finally got to the historical outlines.

So far, I've added a link to each of them from the See also section of the corresponding articles ( History of Alabama#See also, History of the United States Virgin Islands#See also, etc.

This may increase traffic to those pages.

Just thought you'd want to know.

The Transhumanist 00:24, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

		The Iowa Barnstar
		For your creation of the Historical outline of Iowa, I hereby award you the Iowa Barnstar. Bill Whittaker ( talk) 12:55, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I've merged List of United Kingdom-related topics into the Outline of the United Kingdom.

Actually, the merge is in-progress, as most of the merged material is in an invisible link dump at the end of the article (within comment delimiters).

If you have time, please help place the links from the link dump into the body of the outline.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 21:54, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Did you ever make a bot request or otherwise have the portal link images updated for Portal:California? Just wondering because the consensus appears to favor the flag, and that discussion has gotten stale ( Portal talk:California). - Optigan13 ( talk) 19:09, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

The consensus does indeed seem to favor the Flag of California, but I don't believe there's a need to insert this image in all portal links. -- Buaidh ( talk) 19:24, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Please me in a discussion about why the animated Earth image should be used as a flag. Even an edit summary would be helpful, if you don't want to participate in a talk page discussion, but simply reverting with no edit summary is not constructive. Thanks — Andrwsc ( talk · contribs) 18:23, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi Buaidh,

How was your summer?

I'm back from wikibreak. This morning I've been looking over everyone's OOK contributions, and I've been suggesting tasks, potential general direction to head in, etc.

The 50+ pages of the history branch covering the history of the U.S. represent a fairly large portion of the OOK, which we have you to thank for. (Thank you again!). I noticed a few things while browsing them that I thought might interest you...

Based on the way that the history section of various outlines have been developing, I applied the approach on a couple state history outlines to see how it would turn out. Please see:

• Outline of Alabama history
• Outline of Iowa history

Let me know what you think.

To find related articles, I used the following google site-specific searches of Wikipedia:

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=xxt&num=100&q=allintitle%3A++Alabama+%22History+of+%22+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=xxt&num=100&q=allintitle%3A++Iowa+%22History+of+%22+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

To use the above search links for searches on other states, simply change the state name.

More topics can be found by browsing the categories for the corresponding states.

If you have any questions or ideas, please feel free to message me.

Keep in touch, and keep up the great works.

The Transhumanist 17:58, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I think this is a very good approach. I'll see what I can do, time permitting. Buaidh ( talk) 18:12, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I decided to spend the day on these...

So far, I've restructured all of the US-related historical outlines, including two new headings: "History of x, by region", and "History of x, by subject".

I've added some links to the new sections up through the Outline of Kansas history.

In addition to articles, there are lots of sections we can link to. Redirects are best, since they prepare for article expansion / splitting. More details later. I'm done for the day.

Have fun.

The Transhumanist 00:00, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to remove you addition of the territory categories since the article text does not support this as I read it. Even if the article is rewritten to cover these, it is still not a complete list of the territories or areas that the trail was in. Given the number of categories already there, these create category overload. While that is not a reason to remove categories, it is something to consider. Vegaswikian ( talk) 18:23, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi Buaidh. Is there any particular significance to the μ in this, or should I tag it as WP:CSD#R3? I was just going to tag it outright, but seeing as it was created by an established and current editor who almost certainly knows more about the area than me I figured I'd ask you first. :) Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 17:07, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

μSA stands for United States Census Bureau Micropolitan Statistical Area. MSA stands for United States Census Bureau Metropolitan Statistical Area. Yours aye, Buaidh ( talk) 17:15, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Oh, nice! Thanks for teaching me something new! :D Dreaded Walrus ^{t c} 17:26, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Time for some catching up...

Special award and thanks to Buaidh

Congratulations and kudos to Buaidh, the first recipient of the Wikipedia World Developer Award, and the first inductee into the Outline of Knowledge WikiProject's Hall of Fame.

The award was announced about 2 months agos on the WikiProject's talk page, and on Wikipedia's Community Bulletin Board.

Buaidh created the historical outlines for all of the U.S. States, the U.S. capital, and most of the U.S. insular areas. He has also worked indefatigably day after day, improving all of the outlines of the U.S. States, and the outlines of all of the countries of the world!

Who's been up to what?

• Buaidh, working hard on the country outlines.
• Highfields, MacMed, and I worked on the see also sections of the subject articles corresponding to the outlines (adding or updating the links to the relevant outlines and indexes).

Wiki-Zombies

Discussions can sure be frustrating - try getting a proposal through on a guideline's talk page sometime. Most of the time, it seems like the opposition is mindlessly following each other, like...

Zombies. (You've got to see this).

Outline of Knowledge

Yes, it's a proper noun. It's only proper, since we also have an article called Outline of knowledge which is about knowledge generically.

OOK expansion!

After a couple month vacation, I'm ready to slam the gas pedal to the floor. Are you?

Things are speeding up!

Take a look...

New to the OOK

The following outlines have been added to the OOK within the past couple of months or so. Some of them were renames, some of them brand new, and some of them recently discovered after sitting in article space for awhile as orphans.

• Outline of knowledge - yes, your eyes do not deceive you!
• Outline of birds
• Outline of regression analysis
• Outline of water - Highfields
• Outline of string theory
• Outline of quantum theory
• Outline of evidence law in the United States
• Outline of libertarianism
• Outline of radio
• Outline of painting history
• Outline of hydrology
• Outline of rights
• Outline of tort law
• Outline of parapsychology

Here's some more pages that have been renamed to outlines even more recently, but that need to be converted to OOK format:

• Outline of project management
• Outline of production
• Outline of counseling
• Outline of sustainable agriculture
• Outline of pseudoscience
• Outline of human-computer interaction
• Outline of video gaming
• Outline of neuroscience
• Outline of Boolean algebra
• Outline of Green politics
• Outline of vaccines
• Outline of noise
• Outline of mathematical logic
• Outline of circles
• Outline of linear algebra
• Outline of number theory
• Outline of organic gardening and farming
• Outline of futurology
• Outline of group theory
• Outline of clinical research
• Outline of electrical engineering
• Outline of rail transport
• Outline of curves
• Outline of genetic genealogy
• Outline of environmental studies
• Outline of geometric topology
• Outline of U.S. chemical weapons
• Outline of puzzles
• Outline of industrial archaeology
• Outline of graph theory
• Outline of numeral systems
• Outline of set theory
• Outline of partitions
• Outline of U.S. biological weapons
• Outline of real analysis
• Outline of fishing
• Outline of abstract algebra
• Outline of eggs
• Outline of dynamical systems and differential equations
• Outline of ancient Egypt
• Outline of computer vision
• Outline of network theory
• Outline of differential geometry
• Outline of obstetrics
• Outline of complex analysis
• Outline of triangles
• Outline of Lie groups
• Outline of numerical computational geometry
• Outline of functional analysis
• Outline of general topology
• Outline of computability and complexity
• Outline of order theory
• Outline of commutative algebra
• Outline of algebraic topology
• Outline of topology
• Outline of polynomials
• Outline of combinatorial computational geometry
• Outline of recreational number theory

Lists to merge into outlines

The following pairs of pages are content forks and need to be merged:

• List of probability topics --> Outline of probability
• List of software engineering topics --> Outline of software engineering
• List of nanotechnology topics --> Outline of nanotechnology
• List of calculus topics --> Outline of calculus
• List of geometry topics --> Outline of geometry
• List of community topics --> Outline of community
• List of futurology topics --> Outline of futurology
• List of American Civil War topics --> Outline of the American Civil War
• List of computer programming topics --> Outline of computer programming
• List of entertainment industry topics --> Outline of entertainment
• List of health sciences topics --> Outline of health science

Not sure what to rename these to

• List of noncommutative topics in mathematics
• List of MCAT topics (another ook!)

Rough outlines, renamed/moved to draft space

• List of information technology management topics --> Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of Knowledge/Drafts/Outline of information technology management
• List of human resource management topics --> Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of Knowledge/Drafts/Outline of human resource management
• List of suggested topics for computer networking research --> Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of Knowledge/Drafts/Outline of computer networking

Lists that can be structured into decent outlines

• List of exponential topics
• List of computer graphics and descriptive geometry topics
• List of multivariable calculus topics
• List of factorial and binomial topics
• List of permutation topics
• List of algorithm general topics
• List of stochastic processes topics

Only a few hundred more to go.  :)

The Transhumanist 04:46, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

An article that you have been involved in editing, Outline of Louisiana history, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Louisiana history. Thank you.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Note that this includes all of the Outline of U.S._state_name history articles. Karanacs ( talk) 20:38, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Just in case you aren't aware of it yet all of the 'Outline of <state> history' articles have been nominated for deletion here. I saw that you had made many edits to many of these articles and thought you would like to know. Narthring ( talk • contribs) 20:35, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I think you forgot the Category: tag, and I wasn't able to move it to category space. Do you need the content? NawlinWiki ( talk) 19:34, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I forgot the NAMESPACE tag. -- Buaidh ( talk) 19:37, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I've been trying to figure out why two lieutenant governors served under James Bradley Orman, who served one term from Jan 1901 to Jan 1903. Since it was only one term, there wasn't an election in there, so David C. Coates must have left office ( [5] specifies 1902), but I can't figure out why. Do you have any idea what could have happened? I've gone through google books, google news, google, tried local newspaper archives, nothing. Any ideas? Thanks! -- Golbez ( talk) 19:02, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Ugh, it gets more complicated. I found some New York Times articles dating from 1904 referring to Haggott as lt governor or acting governor. Meaning, the state archives must be wrong about him serving only 1902-1903, which means it could equally be wrong about Coates serving 1901-1902. That would help explain why the archives has a gap; the next lt. governor is noted as serving 1904-1905, rather than 1903-. -- Golbez ( talk) 19:10, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Very interesting. I suggest that you call the Colorado State Archives at +1(303)866-2358 tomorrow and ask for their assistance. They have been most helpful to me. Yours aye, Buaidh ( talk) 19:45, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

I've left them an email, I may call in a few days if I get no response. I've updated the article accordingly; based on contemporary sources, it appears McDonald never served as lieutenant governor before the whole three-governors fiasco. Thanks for your response! -- Golbez ( talk) 19:46, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

I have nominated List of articles about Colorado, an article that you created, for deletion. I do not think that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of articles about Colorado. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Thejadefalcon ^{Sing your song} _{The bird's seeds} 18:20, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Would you please make a request to be an autoreviewer? Your new pages don't need to be monitered.  :) Btilm 03:09, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Due to the AfD on the state history outlines, we need to merge them with the corresponding state outlines (into their history sections).

I'll work on them as time permits, but I could sure use some help.

Remember, the new format is to include 3 subheadings:

By period

By region

By subject

Each heading should have something under it (not be empty), so if there is nothing from the historical outline to place there, a quick search of Wikipedia will usually find something relevant.

Section links are fine as well as article links.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist 03:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

A tag has been placed on Flag of Hawai'i.svg, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a redirect to a nonexistent page.

If you can fix this redirect to point to an existing Wikipedia page, please do so and remove the speedy deletion tag. However, please do not remove the speedy deletion tag unless you also fix the redirect. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. A Stop at Willoughby ( talk) 20:26, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Buaidh, I reverted you addition of WPNI and NINB links to the NI article because I did not think these kinds of links are suitable for the article name space. I see you've added similar links to the [{Republic of Ireland]] page. Am I wrong? (In any event, I re-added the Portal:Ireland link to NI, as it takes in NI as well.) --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid ( coṁrá) 21:30, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Template:WPbox has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Optigan13 ( talk) 22:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Per the AfD discusion on the outlines of state histories, I've been merging the historical outlines you built into the corresponding state outlines.

Their essential content has been preserved, and they make nice additions to the state outlines. The state outlines are looking goooood.

Here are the ones that have been merged so far:

1. Alabama
2. Alaska
3. Arizona
4. Arkansas
5. California
6. Colorado
7. Connecticut
8. Delaware
9. Florida
10. Georgia
11. Hawaii
12. Idaho
13. Illinois
14. Indiana
15. Iowa
16. Kansas
17. Kentucky
18. Louisiana
19. Maine
20. Maryland
21. Massachusetts
22. Michigan
23. Minnesota
24. Mississippi

The rest are listed at Portal:Contents/Outline of Knowledge#History and events

Any help you could provide merging those would be most appreciated.

The Transhumanist 23:12, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Can you please use an edit summary when making removals like this? It's really hard to guess at the context or rationale without it. tedder ( talk) 20:30, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

When removing material, such as this edit, please be sure to provide an edit summary so other editors can understand your reasoning. Edits without summaries are often tip-offs to vandalism. So that your intentions are not misunderstood, please, always use an edit summary which explains your rationale (if applicable) or what the intent of the edit is. Thanks, — EncMstr ( talk) 20:30, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

What now...

What on the OOK needs the most work?

The Transhumanist 23:15, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Do not edit this page. This is the archive of User talk:Buaidh for the year 2009. (Please direct any additional comments to the current talk page.) See the annual archives for .