![]() | Outlines NA‑class | ||||||
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![]() | WikiProject Outlines was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 5 November 2007. |
The effort to create new outlines needs to be focused on blatant gaps in coverage. Some obvious ones (shown in red) are included in the list below. Please help create them and turn this list blue! An example of a well-developed sports outline is Outline of kayaking and canoeing.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other gaps that I didn't spot that others would spot instantly.
The Transhumanist 23:02, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
I've simplified this project page, in an effort to make it easier to read, easier to update, and for the sake of general standardization.
The main remaining problem, is the surfeit of subpages. I'd suggest that we need to merge these:
And consider redirecting a number of others, towards the central wikiproject page (outreach, contests, halloffame, newsletterindex, etc). Unnecessary subpages are harmful - people are unlikely to notice or watchlist them; and if they do notice our profusion, they're likely to be overwhelmed by the quantity. The whole point of a wikiproject is to keep things centered, and non-redundant.
Assistance would be appreciated. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:56, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
There is currently a deletion request concerning the Outline of Canada article. Pls join in the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Canada. Moxy ( talk) 19:36, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
Portal:Contents/Outlines has been nominated for deletion. Robert Skyhawk ( T C B) 04:48, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
This project was named after the title of the main list of outlines: Portal:Contents/Outline of Knowledge. But that title was simplified to Portal:Contents/Outlines. This wikiproject's name should be simplified too. It pertains to outlines. Referring to all the outlines on Wikipedia as a single integrated "Outline of Knowledge" is confusing. Most new editors don't get it. I propose we change the name of this project to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines. The Transhumanist 02:12, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
This project is now served by Article alerts, which can be seen at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Article alerts. This will allow us to know about any AfDs or other such discussions without having to rely on notifications on this page. The Alerts page is easily transcluded into userspace if desired. Robert Skyhawk ( T C B) 03:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The hatnote template Template:Main outline is unused and orphaned. Is it still wanted by this project? If not, it can probably be speedied. — This, that, and the other (talk) 03:57, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
How can we improve the availability of outlines (i.e., how can we increase traffic to them)?
My guess is that most traffic to outlines comes from within Wikipedia (via internal links). Outlines apparently don't show up on external search engine searches (at least not anywhere near the top), so they don't get much Google traffic, etc.
Here are some traffic comparisons...
United States is one of the most visited pages on Wikipedia. It's portal and outline don't even get 1% of that traffic:
The portal pages with links on the Main Page get far more traffic than the corresponding outlines:
Other portals get a small fraction of the traffic of Main Page links and prose article traffic, and this applies to outlines as well. In comparing these, sometimes outlines get more traffic than portals, sometimes portals get more:
Where is the traffic coming from, and how can we get more? The Transhumanist 03:30, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
The following outlines are in the process of being annotated (a dash followed by a description or note of interest). Please help add annotations to those entries needing them.
Some outlines currently being developed are:
Some things you could do include gathering missing topics, place links from the see also or general concepts sections, add annotations, etc. The Transhumanist 19:15, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
it's a very useful project for users from other wikipedias! -- 88.5.198.83 ( talk) 12:51, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
Would Outline of Nevada territorial evolution, Outline of North Dakota territorial evolution, Outline of Oregon territorial evolution, Outline of Washington territorial evolution, and Outline of Wyoming territorial evolution fall in the projects scope? I tagged them but I'm not sure. — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 18:19, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm proposing upmerging Category:Incomplete outlines into Category:Outlines. There are very few outlines which could be said to be "complete". If there were a description of the category, it might be different, but I can't imagine what it could be. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:17, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
![]() | The related Category:Incomplete outlines has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming . You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page. |
— Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:27, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
At Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#Undiscussed_List_-.3E_Outline_moves a discussion is underway of the disruptive nature of this WikiProject. There is a consensus to undo a large number of page moves for which this projects purposes were cited as justification. I've started undoing them. About two years ago, this same episode happened and lots of page moves had to get undone. Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:56, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
When my only familiarity with this WikiProject is because of disruption resulting from participation in it, how can I say anything about any of its other aspects, if those exist?
If you look at the discussion I linked to, you will find, among other things, a proposal to abolish this WikiProject. I'm not the one who propsed that. Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:40, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#RfC:_Elimination_of_outline_articles. Ozob ( talk) 00:03, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
The annotating of the entries on Portal:Contents/Outlines is nearing completion.
Annotated entries look like this:
Entries needing annotations look like this:
Please go to Portal:Contents/Outlines' and fill in as many missing annotations as you can, even if it's only one or two. Every little bit helps!
Thank you. The Transhumanist 00:13, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
As a followup to the RFC on elimination of outlines, I have created Wikipedia:Proposed Outline Guideline. Input from the Outlines project would be appreciated. Monty 845 16:23, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Outline_of_algebraic_structures is currently a mess. I have no experience with the Outline Project, so I was going to consult it before doing anything. The outline suffers from multiple problems. The chief problem is that the entire thing is written from the perspective of a universal algebraist. This will be an enormous stumbling block to anyone reading it who isn't a universal algebraist already (i.e. everybody learning about the topic). Besides using the highly specialized terminology, it also uses very obscure terminology ("shell" is an example, the page which it linked to has already been AFD'd). Finally, it includes a large examples section. This section, I would think, would not be appropriate in an outline, but I will not know until I ask. I'm not sure if this article can really ever be whipped completely into shape, because the subject matter will be difficult to organize into an outline. We might be able to make major repairs, though. Rschwieb ( talk) 23:02, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
Template:Satop has been nominated for deletion. Among other things, Template:Satop links an article to its relevant outline, index, and portals. You may wish to comment at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Buaidh
01:28, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
I am beginning to see lengthy outlines of links in See also sections (notably in AI topics, e.g. here, here, here), including links already used in the article. Is that an aspect of this project? If so, it does not fit well with standard practice across WP for See also ( a short, simple bulleted list of nonredundant links). I would think that, rather than increasing the size and complexity of See also sections, the outline articles would collapse many of them with a link to an outline. Joja lozzo 19:59, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
Template:Sar has been nominated for deletion. Among other things, Template:Sar creates a link to the outline of an article in its see also section. You may wish to comment at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Buaidh
21:39, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Created this outline today; not sure if it's ready for prime-time or not. If someone would review it, please? Thanks! Marikafragen ( talk) 00:51, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
I don't understand this WikiProject or any of these "Outline of... " articles. A general reference encyclopedia should provide an outline of any of these subjects at their respective articles. For example, you don't need Outline of Catholicism when you have Catholicism. This seems like a lot of unnecessary duplication.
In some ways, it also seems like these "Outline of... " articles are trying to be portals, but we have an entire Portal namespace devoted to that purpose. For example, Portal:Catholicism.
I'm rather confused. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 04:24, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
Dear MZMcBride,
Are we talking about the same thing? The context in which we are using the term "outline" is short for "hierarchical outline" a type of list and tree structure. All prose articles on Wikipedia fit the general context of "outline" that means "introduction or summary". It's just that "Hierarchical outline of the United States of America" is a bit long for an article title. So we've shortened it to "Outline of...", which is consistent with how the academic community and other encyclopedias refer to hierarchical outlines.
I hope this explanation helps alleviate your confusion.
There is more information available at Outlines and Wikipedia:Outlines.
Sincerely, The Transhumanist 06:19, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
All of those issues have been discussed ad nauseam in Wikipedia's widest forums. The community consensus is to keep outlines where they are, in the article namespace, which is where they and lists in general have been since Wikipedia started.
Keep in mind that outlines, and indexes, are lists. Lists, including outlines and indexes, have been a type of article in the article namespace since the beginning of this encyclopedia. When Wikipedia started, outline and index articles were called "List of x topics".
Outlines and indexes were renamed because they shared the same title convention and began to clash. When there's already a structured topics list (outline) called "List of psychology topics", what do you call an alphabetical topics list (index) on that subject that you want to make? So both types were given their own more accurately descriptive name.
The community decided not to move outlines (or other lists) to another namespace, because lists are articles, and because other namespaces are not supported in searches by default. If you reduce a navigation aid's search access, you reduce its effectiveness. So moving lists defeats the purpose of having lists.
The community has also decided not to change the name. A great deal of research, and trial and error, was conducted to arrive at the current name. Note that alphabetical indexes are also topical (that is, they are comprised of topics). Both are examples of general topics lists. Remember, having an ambiguous name shared by indexes was why outlines were renamed in the first place.
Outlines have a great number of users and supporters. Their traffic has grown to over 6,000,000 page views per year, and continues to grow as outlines continue to improve.
Lists are doing fine where they are, including outlines. Sincerely, The Transhumanist 13:24, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
My devil's advocate comments here (at the bottom of "high quality simple English leads for all articles") may be of interest. Yet another way of making outlines more easy to find would be to add a Hatnote with a link to the corresponding outline at the top of articles with outlines. Keep up the good work, but please make it easier for people to find ;-) LittleBen ( talk) 09:54, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
The outline of metaphysics looks pretty complete- I suggest moving it to article space and finish minor edits there. Metaphysics is the final major red-link in the outline of knowledge. 121.45.215.186 ( talk) 22:30, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
I'm thinking about fixing up Outline of Judaism, but I have a few concerns:
YPN YPN ✡ 01:51, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Featured outlines? that might be of interest to the watchers of this page. -- Toshio Yamaguchi 09:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi, the following WP:CNR all redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of family and consumer science, as a result of page moves by user:The Transhumanist:
The target isnt a well developed topical outline - not mainspace quality IMO. Is anyone likely to improve it soon? If not, I think the redirects from mainspace should be deleted. But I don't want to nominate them for deletion if there is someone here willing to pick up this challenge. John Vandenberg ( chat) 18:42, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
FYI Template:Outline footer ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been requested to be renamed, see template talk:Outline footer -- 65.94.171.126 ( talk) 05:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.
One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.
This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:
• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film
• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.
• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.
• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____
• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost
The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014
For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (
talk)
17:09, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
FYI, "Outline of biophysics" has been requested to be renamed to Biophysical techniques; for the discussion, see talk:Outline of biophysics -- 65.94.169.222 ( talk) 08:50, 27 July 2014 (UTC)
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej ( talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
As lists, outlines are expected to follow the notability guideline for stand-alone lists, which states that a list topic is notable if it is discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources. In addition, the Manual of Style for stand-alone lists states that a stand-alone list should have selection criteria for the items in the list. As far as I know, there is not a single outline that satisfies both these criteria. For example at the top of WikiProject Outlines, the following are given as examples of well-developed outlines: anarchism, ancient Rome, Buddhism, canoeing and kayaking, cell biology, chess, forestry, Iceland, and Japan. Not one of them provides a source for the list as a whole. Should we insist that outlines satisfy the above guidelines? If so, what would the appropriate selection criteria be? And what is an appropriate source? RockMagnetist( talk) 05:14, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
RockMagnetist, the focus of outlines are the topics of the subject of the outline, which is the same scope as regular articles on Wikipedia. Therefore, the selection criteria is specified in the title! "Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline", which means it's a taxonomy of the subject. That is, it's a
tree structure presenting the topics that belong to the subject of the outline. "Outline of geography" means the topics of geography organized as a tree structure. Being amongst the "topics of geography" would be your selection criterion for the Outline of geography.
Keep in mind that any source that deals with a subject as a whole is treating its topics as a set. It is superfluous to provide proof that the topics of an outline form a subject, because the main article on that subject already does so, and to access this verification we generally rely on click-through.
However, WP:VER states that if a challenge is made, a source must be provided. That a subject's topics are a set is so obvious readers rarely challenge it. But if they do, it very easy to prove that the topics to a subject are a set, because they are treated (and discussed) as a set throughout that entire field, and in the fields of general reference publishing, library science, information science, and even artificial intelligence.
Within a field, that field's subject gets broken down into its component parts and presented as a set of topics in text book tables of contents, glossaries, and indexes, in college course catalogs, course syllabi, school curricula, specialized dictionaries (such as single-field dictionaries) and specialized encyclopedias, and taxonomies.
Taxonomies for subjects are included in the subject classification systems used within a field. And because they are taxonomies, each of their branches is a subset of topics. So, if you want to find a subject as a set of topics, go to the taxonomy for the topmost subject it belongs to and refer to its branch. For example, in the field of philosophy, there is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophical literature called PhilPapers. The papers are classified in an extensive structured bibliography of philosophy which presents the entire subject of philosophy as sets of topics. All major branches of knowledge (mathematics, science, humanities, etc.) have treatments similar to this.
In general reference publishing, there's the Encyclopedia Britannica's Outline of Knowledge, which breaks all of knowledge down into sets of topics. There are many catalogs and reference databases which classify their contents in a similar way (by subject), which results in sets of topics.
Library science provides us with library classifications, that present sets of topics.
Taxonomies (outlines) are central to domains and ontologies as discussed in the fields of information science and artificial intelligence that design programs and databases for particular subjects - those subjects must be defined with respect to the topics (terminology, etc.) they are comprised of, and the relationships between them. The result again is sets of topics.
It is best not to worry about it. Proving that a subject has a set of topics is almost the same as proving that the subject is a subject. Because all subjects have a set of topics. This is universal. The Transhumanist 10:16, 25 December 2014 (UTC)
MOS:SEEALSO says that "the 'See also' section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes," which seems in contradiction to WP:EMBED#See also lists saying that "links in these sections should have been featured in the article". Indeed, often see also sections serve as a mini-outline of key-concepts in the article. WP:NAV are appropriate when related links are sufficiently cohesive so as to be reused as a whole from multiple pages. Otherwise, what are your thoughts on allowing mini-outline sections listing key concepts within a given article? Is this issue already covered in any guideline? Thanks. Fgnievinski ( talk) 01:27, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
Some examples (please add more):
A very nice outline of evolution has been created by TheProfessor. It bridges the gap we had that was caused by Outline of the creation-evolution controversy. The Transhumanist 11:57, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!
Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.
Harej ( talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Hi everybody. On behalf of the teams behind the Wikipedia Primary School research project, I would like to announce that the article Outline of domestic violence was selected a while ago to be reviewed by an external expert. We'd now like to ask interested editors to join our efforts and improve the article before March 31, 2015 (any timezone) as they see fit; a revision will be then sent to the designated expert for review. Any notes and remarks written by the external expert will be made available on the article's talk page under a CC-BY-SA license as soon as possible, so that you can read them, discuss them and then decide if and how to use them. Please sign up here to let us know you're collaborating. Thanks a lot for your support! -- Elitre (WPS) ( talk) 12:33, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi. I've recently been working on the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of the Cold War, and as someone new to outlines, would welcome any thoughts on its content and structure so far, and what needs to be added/changed before it's moved to article space. -- CSJJ104 ( talk) 19:04, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
"Outline"-articles appear to extensively interleave with WikiProjects. I think it would be a good idea to somehow combine both approaches for an increase in productivity, coordination and utility. There are probably many ways to do so...this post isn't supposed to be a worked out suggestion - I just hope to initiate some discussion on this.
Some examples right away:
(All of this also seems to be relevant to
WikiProject X)
Would be interested what you think of this...
--
Fixuture (
talk)
00:30, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
The project should be speedily closed and "outline" pages merged back into their source articles. It is WP:CFORK, pure and simple. -- Ghirla -трёп- 09:19, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Outline of the Palestinian territories to be moved to Outline of the State of Palestine. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 23:04, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I am a bit confused about this recent change, and have reverted it (for now). Are outlines considered as articles or as lists by this project? They always looked more list-y for me :). Thanks for any background information, as I am fairly ignorant about outlines in general (just tweaked Germany's outline once or twice), and couldn't find any specific decision about this aspect on this talkpage. GermanJoe ( talk) 18:43, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
@ Fixuture: I stated above that I would look over Portals' treatment of topics. Here's what I've learned:
The topics lists are structured, and therefore they're topic outlines.
It appears that the majority of portals that have a topics section, custom format that section to match the rest of the portal. Most of these sections have topics lists that appear to be built from scratch.
Some portals transclude the corresponding navigation footer into the topics section, and use that as its topics list.
Many portals do not have a topics section at all.
Many portals have a different name for the topics section. Such as "articles", "major topics", "basics", etc.
For many portals, there is no corresponding outline article. For many outlines, there is no corresponding portal page.
Based on the above observations, I believe it would not be feasible to seek consensus to transclude outlines into portals, due to the diversity of portal designs and portals' tradition of customization.
However, providing a link to the corresponding outline in each portal's topic section is doable and non-disruptive. The Transhumanist 14:11, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
It seems like there's a lot of old draft outline hidden away in Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts. Most has not been edited for months if not longer. Do you think it makes sense moving those to draftspace and perhaps adding in other relevant WikiProjects for them? It may get some eyes on a few of them. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 08:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Ricky81682 wrote, at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of the LGBT community:
Refer to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Longevity and you should see why the idea of deferring MFD to a WikiProject is a problem. If you think there's a collective issue, then it can be discussed but outlines overall should not be discussed at the WikiProject with some presumption that the project has some greater expertise or authority on the subject than anywhere else. As noted before, that creates problems. Otherwise, I am evaluating these as pages and based on my review of this page, I see no reason why there would need to be an outline on this topic when another outline on a similar topic already exists and when there's no indication that this draft is being improved upon. I see nothing from you about the actual content of this page, just some complaining and demands that all further discussion about things created within this project be carved out from MFD (and I assume AFD/CFD and otherwise) if it relates to an outline and left to the project and the project's editors rather than the wider community. I would say that the outlines project would have been better served if, from day one, there was an effort even a minimal one to inform people involved in the actual topics about those outlines rather than take on the approach that the Outlines project, and that project alone, should be concerned with outlines. That attitude is one large reason why I suspect the remaining outlines are stagnant and entirely dependent on a single editor's involvement. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 06:37, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
I agree with much of that, but not all, and certainly not discussing serious precedent setting decisions in multiple places. Here is appropriate. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 01:52, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
Is hereby awarded to Mindfrieze for creating the Outline of sailing, which is now in article space. Keep up the good work! The Transhumanist 00:26, 12 July 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
Is hereby awarded to Marikafragen for creating the Outline of adoption, which is now in article space. Thank you for creating this outline! The Transhumanist 22:43, 12 July 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to CSJJ104 for creating the Outline of the Cold War, which is now in article space. Thank you for filling this gap in the navigation system! The Transhumanist 05:06, 15 July 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Randy Kryn for work done on the Outline of Star Trek, including content contributions, copy editing, title italicizing, and placing links to the outline. Keep up the excellent work! The Transhumanist 22:40, 18 July 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Broter for creating and developing the Outline of Joseph Smith. A very fine job indeed. The Transhumanist 19:14, 10 August 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to PKT for creating and developing the Outline of New Brunswick. Well done. Thank you. The Transhumanist 04:33, 12 August 2016 (UTC) |
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Lakun.patra for creating and developing the Outline of Assam. A very nice addition to the collection. Keep up the good work. Thank you. The Transhumanist 08:14, 21 August 2016 (UTC) |
Interested parties can preview Draft:Glossary of cannabis terms which, as under discussion on its talkpage, very well could end up published as Outline of cannabis by the end of April. - Bri ( talk) 01:59, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
I was working on Outline of Peru and added the Spanish official and common endonyms, and I was thinking about the best formatting to add official endonyms in Quechua and Aymara. I went to a couple other multi-language country outlines to see examples of how it was done and noticed that on several outlines of countries, official endonyms and common endonyms are left blank if there are multiple official languages (see Outline of Switzerland, Outline of Paraguay). Is this a policy, or is this just the result of the examples I picked? -- Furicorn ( talk) 09:26, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
I was comparing outlines for Germany, Japan, and Peru and I noticed the following issue with the template.
The following two bullets both redirect to here: List of countries and dependencies and their capitals in native languages
I assume it would make sense to harmonize both those links in the template since they are going to the same place now. Also, I would note that List of countries and dependencies and their capitals in native languages doesn't actually include the official endonyms anymore. For instance, Germany's official endonym is "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", but only the common endonym "Deutschland" appears on the new redirect page. Obviously this is sort of an upstream problem for this template, but it makes me wonder if there is a new place that lists all the official endonyms now. Furicorn ( talk) 09:07, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm in the process of building scripts for viewing outlines and for outline development.
So far, there is:
It is my objective to build a set of scripts that fully automate the process of creating outlines. This end goal is a long way off ( AI-complete?). In the meantime, I hope to increase productivity as much as I can. Fifty percent automation would double an editor's productivity. I think I could reach 80% automation (a five-fold increase in productivity) within a couple years.
There's more:
Script and script feature requests (for outlines) are welcome. The Transhumanist 06:15, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 11:00, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
I would like to propose that an icon for "outlines" be created.
Currently, the icon generally used is:
. This image is the general image for wikipedia.
Given the number of outlines on wikipedia, I believe that they should have their own icon (for example, for use in footers)
The image is suggest using is seen below; it is used by both Wikiproject Outline and the Outline portal, as shown below:
![]() | Outlines NA‑class | ||||||
|
"File:Global thinking.svg" is the image name
The code I suggest using is "OUT"
Examples of places it could be used, such as footers, are below:
What do people think? (I'm going to ping all of the users listed in the members section)
-- DannyS712 ( talk) 17:54, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist, Buaidh, Penubag, Highfields, Juliancolton, NuclearWarfare, Minnecologies, Thehelpfulone, Stefan, Quiddity, Knobbly, Gimme danger, Sj, Tarheel95, Offiikart, Mandsford, Robert Skyhawk, Geekdiva, AstroHurricane001, Pbsouthwood, Cymru.lass, Thruxton, CReep-cReep, Toshio Yamaguchi, RockMagnetist, CaroleHenson, Gamewizard71, WeijiBaikeBianji, Jaldous1, Ohmyerica, and AmericanAir88: -- DannyS712 ( talk) 01:40, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
also @ Auldhouse: -- DannyS712 ( talk) 01:42, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
This has been done . The icon is:
{{icon|Outline}}
--
DannyS712 (
talk)
22:04, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Bri for creating and developing the Outline of cannabis. A very interesting topic, indeed, with much coverage on Wikipedia that this outline makes easier to find and navigate. Keep up the good work. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 22:12, 30 November 2018 (UTC) |
Hello WikiProject team: I propose that we move all of the Draft outlines (currently located as subpages to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts) to the Draft: namespace. This will allow them to get broader visibility and contributions. Thoughts? UnitedStatesian ( talk) 14:12, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
How would other participants in this WikiProject feel about a bot that adds a standardized short description to outlines that don't already have a short description. I suggest something along the lines of Overview of and topical guide to ___
, where ___ is replaced by the topic, but that's just my 2 cents. Thoughts? --
DannyS712 (
talk)
07:08, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
Why are so many of the outlines assessed as High-importance? Abductive ( reasoning) 23:24, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
I have invited discussion on the scope of some sections of the Outline of Cape Town at Talk:Outline of Cape Town. Clarifying some of those points may have relevance on other outlines of cities, so opinions from this project are also invited. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 15:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.
We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma ( talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Outline of Big Science is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Big Science until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 19:21, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like
John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.
)and turns it into something like
It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{ cite web}}, {{ cite journal}} and {{ doi}}.
The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.
Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.
This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 16:02, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at
Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent
Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class=
parameter to {{
WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.
No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{ WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.
However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{
WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom
parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present.
Aymatth2 (
talk)
19:35, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Fluid_dynamics#Outline. fgnievinski ( talk) 02:44, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Outlines § Deprecation of outlines?. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
22:40, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
It's fairly well-known that {{
See also}}
is normally verboten at the top of an article, as it's intended for use with an article's sections. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to create a new {{
See index}}
hatnote template to replace it when linking to the corresponding index at the top of outlines?
Remsense
诉
16:08, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
{{
See index}}
is not a bad idea. Feel free to implement it. —
The Transhumanist
14:34, 24 April 2024 (UTC)It has a good selection of relevant links with strange comments attached to them. Social anthropology is a major subfield and it's correct to link it, but at time of writing it describes Social anthropology as "the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom." Some of the descriptions are prescriptive and some are descriptive and plenty more are just wrong.
Has this wikiproject come up with an internal manual of style? 2A02:C7C:4C00:8500:D9BA:D96E:286D:1A33 ( talk) 12:12, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Could someone please check my edits as the forestry project is only semi-active and I have never edited an outline before as far as I remember Chidgk1 ( talk) 12:47, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
Here is a trick to make redirected wikilinks stand out by turning them green instead of blue! This is especially useful when working on navigation aids like lists and outlines, where you need to be sure a link leads to where it says it links to. This quick and easy solution uses customized CSS:
Go to your Preferences, click on the "Appearance" tab, and click the "Custom CSS" to the right of the skin you use. It opens a page to edit, and you can add the following code (just copy and paste it):
.mw-redirect {
color: #006633;
}
.mw-redirect:visited {
color: #009900;
}
.mw-redirect:hover {
color: #990000;
}
.mw-redirect:active {
color: #990000;
}
Save the page, and reload ( bypass your browser cache) and/or ( ) the Wikipedia server to force the new CSS to be included. All redirects will now show up as green links! If you prefer a different color, you can modify them by using six-digit hex codes.
The Outline of transhumanism was deleted via redirect per AfD discussion.
In case you would like to work on the outline in order to fix it...
Copies of the outline can now be found at the Internet Archive, including its edit page (i.e., the wiki text version). — The Transhumanist 07:22, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240509064923//info/en/?search=Outline_of_transhumanism
The wiki source text for Outline of transhumanism can be seen at:
![]() | Outlines NA‑class | ||||||
|
![]() | WikiProject Outlines was featured in a WikiProject Report in the Signpost on 5 November 2007. |
The effort to create new outlines needs to be focused on blatant gaps in coverage. Some obvious ones (shown in red) are included in the list below. Please help create them and turn this list blue! An example of a well-developed sports outline is Outline of kayaking and canoeing.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other gaps that I didn't spot that others would spot instantly.
The Transhumanist 23:02, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
I've simplified this project page, in an effort to make it easier to read, easier to update, and for the sake of general standardization.
The main remaining problem, is the surfeit of subpages. I'd suggest that we need to merge these:
And consider redirecting a number of others, towards the central wikiproject page (outreach, contests, halloffame, newsletterindex, etc). Unnecessary subpages are harmful - people are unlikely to notice or watchlist them; and if they do notice our profusion, they're likely to be overwhelmed by the quantity. The whole point of a wikiproject is to keep things centered, and non-redundant.
Assistance would be appreciated. -- Quiddity ( talk) 01:56, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
There is currently a deletion request concerning the Outline of Canada article. Pls join in the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Canada. Moxy ( talk) 19:36, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
Portal:Contents/Outlines has been nominated for deletion. Robert Skyhawk ( T C B) 04:48, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
This project was named after the title of the main list of outlines: Portal:Contents/Outline of Knowledge. But that title was simplified to Portal:Contents/Outlines. This wikiproject's name should be simplified too. It pertains to outlines. Referring to all the outlines on Wikipedia as a single integrated "Outline of Knowledge" is confusing. Most new editors don't get it. I propose we change the name of this project to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines. The Transhumanist 02:12, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
This project is now served by Article alerts, which can be seen at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Article alerts. This will allow us to know about any AfDs or other such discussions without having to rely on notifications on this page. The Alerts page is easily transcluded into userspace if desired. Robert Skyhawk ( T C B) 03:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The hatnote template Template:Main outline is unused and orphaned. Is it still wanted by this project? If not, it can probably be speedied. — This, that, and the other (talk) 03:57, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
How can we improve the availability of outlines (i.e., how can we increase traffic to them)?
My guess is that most traffic to outlines comes from within Wikipedia (via internal links). Outlines apparently don't show up on external search engine searches (at least not anywhere near the top), so they don't get much Google traffic, etc.
Here are some traffic comparisons...
United States is one of the most visited pages on Wikipedia. It's portal and outline don't even get 1% of that traffic:
The portal pages with links on the Main Page get far more traffic than the corresponding outlines:
Other portals get a small fraction of the traffic of Main Page links and prose article traffic, and this applies to outlines as well. In comparing these, sometimes outlines get more traffic than portals, sometimes portals get more:
Where is the traffic coming from, and how can we get more? The Transhumanist 03:30, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
The following outlines are in the process of being annotated (a dash followed by a description or note of interest). Please help add annotations to those entries needing them.
Some outlines currently being developed are:
Some things you could do include gathering missing topics, place links from the see also or general concepts sections, add annotations, etc. The Transhumanist 19:15, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
it's a very useful project for users from other wikipedias! -- 88.5.198.83 ( talk) 12:51, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
Would Outline of Nevada territorial evolution, Outline of North Dakota territorial evolution, Outline of Oregon territorial evolution, Outline of Washington territorial evolution, and Outline of Wyoming territorial evolution fall in the projects scope? I tagged them but I'm not sure. — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 18:19, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
I'm proposing upmerging Category:Incomplete outlines into Category:Outlines. There are very few outlines which could be said to be "complete". If there were a description of the category, it might be different, but I can't imagine what it could be. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:17, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
![]() | The related Category:Incomplete outlines has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming . You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page. |
— Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:27, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
At Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#Undiscussed_List_-.3E_Outline_moves a discussion is underway of the disruptive nature of this WikiProject. There is a consensus to undo a large number of page moves for which this projects purposes were cited as justification. I've started undoing them. About two years ago, this same episode happened and lots of page moves had to get undone. Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:56, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
When my only familiarity with this WikiProject is because of disruption resulting from participation in it, how can I say anything about any of its other aspects, if those exist?
If you look at the discussion I linked to, you will find, among other things, a proposal to abolish this WikiProject. I'm not the one who propsed that. Michael Hardy ( talk) 23:40, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#RfC:_Elimination_of_outline_articles. Ozob ( talk) 00:03, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
The annotating of the entries on Portal:Contents/Outlines is nearing completion.
Annotated entries look like this:
Entries needing annotations look like this:
Please go to Portal:Contents/Outlines' and fill in as many missing annotations as you can, even if it's only one or two. Every little bit helps!
Thank you. The Transhumanist 00:13, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
As a followup to the RFC on elimination of outlines, I have created Wikipedia:Proposed Outline Guideline. Input from the Outlines project would be appreciated. Monty 845 16:23, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Outline_of_algebraic_structures is currently a mess. I have no experience with the Outline Project, so I was going to consult it before doing anything. The outline suffers from multiple problems. The chief problem is that the entire thing is written from the perspective of a universal algebraist. This will be an enormous stumbling block to anyone reading it who isn't a universal algebraist already (i.e. everybody learning about the topic). Besides using the highly specialized terminology, it also uses very obscure terminology ("shell" is an example, the page which it linked to has already been AFD'd). Finally, it includes a large examples section. This section, I would think, would not be appropriate in an outline, but I will not know until I ask. I'm not sure if this article can really ever be whipped completely into shape, because the subject matter will be difficult to organize into an outline. We might be able to make major repairs, though. Rschwieb ( talk) 23:02, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
Template:Satop has been nominated for deletion. Among other things, Template:Satop links an article to its relevant outline, index, and portals. You may wish to comment at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Buaidh
01:28, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
I am beginning to see lengthy outlines of links in See also sections (notably in AI topics, e.g. here, here, here), including links already used in the article. Is that an aspect of this project? If so, it does not fit well with standard practice across WP for See also ( a short, simple bulleted list of nonredundant links). I would think that, rather than increasing the size and complexity of See also sections, the outline articles would collapse many of them with a link to an outline. Joja lozzo 19:59, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
Template:Sar has been nominated for deletion. Among other things, Template:Sar creates a link to the outline of an article in its see also section. You may wish to comment at
the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page.
Buaidh
21:39, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
Created this outline today; not sure if it's ready for prime-time or not. If someone would review it, please? Thanks! Marikafragen ( talk) 00:51, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
I don't understand this WikiProject or any of these "Outline of... " articles. A general reference encyclopedia should provide an outline of any of these subjects at their respective articles. For example, you don't need Outline of Catholicism when you have Catholicism. This seems like a lot of unnecessary duplication.
In some ways, it also seems like these "Outline of... " articles are trying to be portals, but we have an entire Portal namespace devoted to that purpose. For example, Portal:Catholicism.
I'm rather confused. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 04:24, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
Dear MZMcBride,
Are we talking about the same thing? The context in which we are using the term "outline" is short for "hierarchical outline" a type of list and tree structure. All prose articles on Wikipedia fit the general context of "outline" that means "introduction or summary". It's just that "Hierarchical outline of the United States of America" is a bit long for an article title. So we've shortened it to "Outline of...", which is consistent with how the academic community and other encyclopedias refer to hierarchical outlines.
I hope this explanation helps alleviate your confusion.
There is more information available at Outlines and Wikipedia:Outlines.
Sincerely, The Transhumanist 06:19, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
All of those issues have been discussed ad nauseam in Wikipedia's widest forums. The community consensus is to keep outlines where they are, in the article namespace, which is where they and lists in general have been since Wikipedia started.
Keep in mind that outlines, and indexes, are lists. Lists, including outlines and indexes, have been a type of article in the article namespace since the beginning of this encyclopedia. When Wikipedia started, outline and index articles were called "List of x topics".
Outlines and indexes were renamed because they shared the same title convention and began to clash. When there's already a structured topics list (outline) called "List of psychology topics", what do you call an alphabetical topics list (index) on that subject that you want to make? So both types were given their own more accurately descriptive name.
The community decided not to move outlines (or other lists) to another namespace, because lists are articles, and because other namespaces are not supported in searches by default. If you reduce a navigation aid's search access, you reduce its effectiveness. So moving lists defeats the purpose of having lists.
The community has also decided not to change the name. A great deal of research, and trial and error, was conducted to arrive at the current name. Note that alphabetical indexes are also topical (that is, they are comprised of topics). Both are examples of general topics lists. Remember, having an ambiguous name shared by indexes was why outlines were renamed in the first place.
Outlines have a great number of users and supporters. Their traffic has grown to over 6,000,000 page views per year, and continues to grow as outlines continue to improve.
Lists are doing fine where they are, including outlines. Sincerely, The Transhumanist 13:24, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
My devil's advocate comments here (at the bottom of "high quality simple English leads for all articles") may be of interest. Yet another way of making outlines more easy to find would be to add a Hatnote with a link to the corresponding outline at the top of articles with outlines. Keep up the good work, but please make it easier for people to find ;-) LittleBen ( talk) 09:54, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
The outline of metaphysics looks pretty complete- I suggest moving it to article space and finish minor edits there. Metaphysics is the final major red-link in the outline of knowledge. 121.45.215.186 ( talk) 22:30, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
I'm thinking about fixing up Outline of Judaism, but I have a few concerns:
YPN YPN ✡ 01:51, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
There is a proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Featured outlines? that might be of interest to the watchers of this page. -- Toshio Yamaguchi 09:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi, the following WP:CNR all redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of family and consumer science, as a result of page moves by user:The Transhumanist:
The target isnt a well developed topical outline - not mainspace quality IMO. Is anyone likely to improve it soon? If not, I think the redirects from mainspace should be deleted. But I don't want to nominate them for deletion if there is someone here willing to pick up this challenge. John Vandenberg ( chat) 18:42, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
FYI Template:Outline footer ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been requested to be renamed, see template talk:Outline footer -- 65.94.171.126 ( talk) 05:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.
One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.
This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:
• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film
• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.
• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.
• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____
• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost
The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014
For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (
talk)
17:09, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
FYI, "Outline of biophysics" has been requested to be renamed to Biophysical techniques; for the discussion, see talk:Outline of biophysics -- 65.94.169.222 ( talk) 08:50, 27 July 2014 (UTC)
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej ( talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
As lists, outlines are expected to follow the notability guideline for stand-alone lists, which states that a list topic is notable if it is discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources. In addition, the Manual of Style for stand-alone lists states that a stand-alone list should have selection criteria for the items in the list. As far as I know, there is not a single outline that satisfies both these criteria. For example at the top of WikiProject Outlines, the following are given as examples of well-developed outlines: anarchism, ancient Rome, Buddhism, canoeing and kayaking, cell biology, chess, forestry, Iceland, and Japan. Not one of them provides a source for the list as a whole. Should we insist that outlines satisfy the above guidelines? If so, what would the appropriate selection criteria be? And what is an appropriate source? RockMagnetist( talk) 05:14, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
RockMagnetist, the focus of outlines are the topics of the subject of the outline, which is the same scope as regular articles on Wikipedia. Therefore, the selection criteria is specified in the title! "Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline", which means it's a taxonomy of the subject. That is, it's a
tree structure presenting the topics that belong to the subject of the outline. "Outline of geography" means the topics of geography organized as a tree structure. Being amongst the "topics of geography" would be your selection criterion for the Outline of geography.
Keep in mind that any source that deals with a subject as a whole is treating its topics as a set. It is superfluous to provide proof that the topics of an outline form a subject, because the main article on that subject already does so, and to access this verification we generally rely on click-through.
However, WP:VER states that if a challenge is made, a source must be provided. That a subject's topics are a set is so obvious readers rarely challenge it. But if they do, it very easy to prove that the topics to a subject are a set, because they are treated (and discussed) as a set throughout that entire field, and in the fields of general reference publishing, library science, information science, and even artificial intelligence.
Within a field, that field's subject gets broken down into its component parts and presented as a set of topics in text book tables of contents, glossaries, and indexes, in college course catalogs, course syllabi, school curricula, specialized dictionaries (such as single-field dictionaries) and specialized encyclopedias, and taxonomies.
Taxonomies for subjects are included in the subject classification systems used within a field. And because they are taxonomies, each of their branches is a subset of topics. So, if you want to find a subject as a set of topics, go to the taxonomy for the topmost subject it belongs to and refer to its branch. For example, in the field of philosophy, there is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophical literature called PhilPapers. The papers are classified in an extensive structured bibliography of philosophy which presents the entire subject of philosophy as sets of topics. All major branches of knowledge (mathematics, science, humanities, etc.) have treatments similar to this.
In general reference publishing, there's the Encyclopedia Britannica's Outline of Knowledge, which breaks all of knowledge down into sets of topics. There are many catalogs and reference databases which classify their contents in a similar way (by subject), which results in sets of topics.
Library science provides us with library classifications, that present sets of topics.
Taxonomies (outlines) are central to domains and ontologies as discussed in the fields of information science and artificial intelligence that design programs and databases for particular subjects - those subjects must be defined with respect to the topics (terminology, etc.) they are comprised of, and the relationships between them. The result again is sets of topics.
It is best not to worry about it. Proving that a subject has a set of topics is almost the same as proving that the subject is a subject. Because all subjects have a set of topics. This is universal. The Transhumanist 10:16, 25 December 2014 (UTC)
MOS:SEEALSO says that "the 'See also' section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body or its navigation boxes," which seems in contradiction to WP:EMBED#See also lists saying that "links in these sections should have been featured in the article". Indeed, often see also sections serve as a mini-outline of key-concepts in the article. WP:NAV are appropriate when related links are sufficiently cohesive so as to be reused as a whole from multiple pages. Otherwise, what are your thoughts on allowing mini-outline sections listing key concepts within a given article? Is this issue already covered in any guideline? Thanks. Fgnievinski ( talk) 01:27, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
Some examples (please add more):
A very nice outline of evolution has been created by TheProfessor. It bridges the gap we had that was caused by Outline of the creation-evolution controversy. The Transhumanist 11:57, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!
Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.
Harej ( talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Hi everybody. On behalf of the teams behind the Wikipedia Primary School research project, I would like to announce that the article Outline of domestic violence was selected a while ago to be reviewed by an external expert. We'd now like to ask interested editors to join our efforts and improve the article before March 31, 2015 (any timezone) as they see fit; a revision will be then sent to the designated expert for review. Any notes and remarks written by the external expert will be made available on the article's talk page under a CC-BY-SA license as soon as possible, so that you can read them, discuss them and then decide if and how to use them. Please sign up here to let us know you're collaborating. Thanks a lot for your support! -- Elitre (WPS) ( talk) 12:33, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
Hi. I've recently been working on the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of the Cold War, and as someone new to outlines, would welcome any thoughts on its content and structure so far, and what needs to be added/changed before it's moved to article space. -- CSJJ104 ( talk) 19:04, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
"Outline"-articles appear to extensively interleave with WikiProjects. I think it would be a good idea to somehow combine both approaches for an increase in productivity, coordination and utility. There are probably many ways to do so...this post isn't supposed to be a worked out suggestion - I just hope to initiate some discussion on this.
Some examples right away:
(All of this also seems to be relevant to
WikiProject X)
Would be interested what you think of this...
--
Fixuture (
talk)
00:30, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
The project should be speedily closed and "outline" pages merged back into their source articles. It is WP:CFORK, pure and simple. -- Ghirla -трёп- 09:19, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Outline of the Palestinian territories to be moved to Outline of the State of Palestine. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. — RMCD bot 23:04, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I am a bit confused about this recent change, and have reverted it (for now). Are outlines considered as articles or as lists by this project? They always looked more list-y for me :). Thanks for any background information, as I am fairly ignorant about outlines in general (just tweaked Germany's outline once or twice), and couldn't find any specific decision about this aspect on this talkpage. GermanJoe ( talk) 18:43, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
@ Fixuture: I stated above that I would look over Portals' treatment of topics. Here's what I've learned:
The topics lists are structured, and therefore they're topic outlines.
It appears that the majority of portals that have a topics section, custom format that section to match the rest of the portal. Most of these sections have topics lists that appear to be built from scratch.
Some portals transclude the corresponding navigation footer into the topics section, and use that as its topics list.
Many portals do not have a topics section at all.
Many portals have a different name for the topics section. Such as "articles", "major topics", "basics", etc.
For many portals, there is no corresponding outline article. For many outlines, there is no corresponding portal page.
Based on the above observations, I believe it would not be feasible to seek consensus to transclude outlines into portals, due to the diversity of portal designs and portals' tradition of customization.
However, providing a link to the corresponding outline in each portal's topic section is doable and non-disruptive. The Transhumanist 14:11, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
It seems like there's a lot of old draft outline hidden away in Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts. Most has not been edited for months if not longer. Do you think it makes sense moving those to draftspace and perhaps adding in other relevant WikiProjects for them? It may get some eyes on a few of them. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 08:40, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
Ricky81682 wrote, at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of the LGBT community:
Refer to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Longevity and you should see why the idea of deferring MFD to a WikiProject is a problem. If you think there's a collective issue, then it can be discussed but outlines overall should not be discussed at the WikiProject with some presumption that the project has some greater expertise or authority on the subject than anywhere else. As noted before, that creates problems. Otherwise, I am evaluating these as pages and based on my review of this page, I see no reason why there would need to be an outline on this topic when another outline on a similar topic already exists and when there's no indication that this draft is being improved upon. I see nothing from you about the actual content of this page, just some complaining and demands that all further discussion about things created within this project be carved out from MFD (and I assume AFD/CFD and otherwise) if it relates to an outline and left to the project and the project's editors rather than the wider community. I would say that the outlines project would have been better served if, from day one, there was an effort even a minimal one to inform people involved in the actual topics about those outlines rather than take on the approach that the Outlines project, and that project alone, should be concerned with outlines. That attitude is one large reason why I suspect the remaining outlines are stagnant and entirely dependent on a single editor's involvement. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 06:37, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
I agree with much of that, but not all, and certainly not discussing serious precedent setting decisions in multiple places. Here is appropriate. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 01:52, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
Is hereby awarded to Mindfrieze for creating the Outline of sailing, which is now in article space. Keep up the good work! The Transhumanist 00:26, 12 July 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
Is hereby awarded to Marikafragen for creating the Outline of adoption, which is now in article space. Thank you for creating this outline! The Transhumanist 22:43, 12 July 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to CSJJ104 for creating the Outline of the Cold War, which is now in article space. Thank you for filling this gap in the navigation system! The Transhumanist 05:06, 15 July 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Randy Kryn for work done on the Outline of Star Trek, including content contributions, copy editing, title italicizing, and placing links to the outline. Keep up the excellent work! The Transhumanist 22:40, 18 July 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Broter for creating and developing the Outline of Joseph Smith. A very fine job indeed. The Transhumanist 19:14, 10 August 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to PKT for creating and developing the Outline of New Brunswick. Well done. Thank you. The Transhumanist 04:33, 12 August 2016 (UTC) |
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The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Lakun.patra for creating and developing the Outline of Assam. A very nice addition to the collection. Keep up the good work. Thank you. The Transhumanist 08:14, 21 August 2016 (UTC) |
Interested parties can preview Draft:Glossary of cannabis terms which, as under discussion on its talkpage, very well could end up published as Outline of cannabis by the end of April. - Bri ( talk) 01:59, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
I was working on Outline of Peru and added the Spanish official and common endonyms, and I was thinking about the best formatting to add official endonyms in Quechua and Aymara. I went to a couple other multi-language country outlines to see examples of how it was done and noticed that on several outlines of countries, official endonyms and common endonyms are left blank if there are multiple official languages (see Outline of Switzerland, Outline of Paraguay). Is this a policy, or is this just the result of the examples I picked? -- Furicorn ( talk) 09:26, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
I was comparing outlines for Germany, Japan, and Peru and I noticed the following issue with the template.
The following two bullets both redirect to here: List of countries and dependencies and their capitals in native languages
I assume it would make sense to harmonize both those links in the template since they are going to the same place now. Also, I would note that List of countries and dependencies and their capitals in native languages doesn't actually include the official endonyms anymore. For instance, Germany's official endonym is "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", but only the common endonym "Deutschland" appears on the new redirect page. Obviously this is sort of an upstream problem for this template, but it makes me wonder if there is a new place that lists all the official endonyms now. Furicorn ( talk) 09:07, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
I'm in the process of building scripts for viewing outlines and for outline development.
So far, there is:
It is my objective to build a set of scripts that fully automate the process of creating outlines. This end goal is a long way off ( AI-complete?). In the meantime, I hope to increase productivity as much as I can. Fifty percent automation would double an editor's productivity. I think I could reach 80% automation (a five-fold increase in productivity) within a couple years.
There's more:
Script and script feature requests (for outlines) are welcome. The Transhumanist 06:15, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.
Portals are being redesigned.
The new design features are being applied to existing portals.
At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{ Transclude lead excerpt}}.
The discussion about this can be found here.
Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.
On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.
Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.
So far, 84 editors have joined.
If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.
If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.
Thank you. — The Transhumanist 11:00, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
I would like to propose that an icon for "outlines" be created.
Currently, the icon generally used is:
. This image is the general image for wikipedia.
Given the number of outlines on wikipedia, I believe that they should have their own icon (for example, for use in footers)
The image is suggest using is seen below; it is used by both Wikiproject Outline and the Outline portal, as shown below:
![]() | Outlines NA‑class | ||||||
|
"File:Global thinking.svg" is the image name
The code I suggest using is "OUT"
Examples of places it could be used, such as footers, are below:
What do people think? (I'm going to ping all of the users listed in the members section)
-- DannyS712 ( talk) 17:54, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
@ The Transhumanist, Buaidh, Penubag, Highfields, Juliancolton, NuclearWarfare, Minnecologies, Thehelpfulone, Stefan, Quiddity, Knobbly, Gimme danger, Sj, Tarheel95, Offiikart, Mandsford, Robert Skyhawk, Geekdiva, AstroHurricane001, Pbsouthwood, Cymru.lass, Thruxton, CReep-cReep, Toshio Yamaguchi, RockMagnetist, CaroleHenson, Gamewizard71, WeijiBaikeBianji, Jaldous1, Ohmyerica, and AmericanAir88: -- DannyS712 ( talk) 01:40, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
also @ Auldhouse: -- DannyS712 ( talk) 01:42, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
This has been done . The icon is:
{{icon|Outline}}
--
DannyS712 (
talk)
22:04, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
is hereby awarded to Bri for creating and developing the Outline of cannabis. A very interesting topic, indeed, with much coverage on Wikipedia that this outline makes easier to find and navigate. Keep up the good work. Thank you. — The Transhumanist 22:12, 30 November 2018 (UTC) |
Hello WikiProject team: I propose that we move all of the Draft outlines (currently located as subpages to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts) to the Draft: namespace. This will allow them to get broader visibility and contributions. Thoughts? UnitedStatesian ( talk) 14:12, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
How would other participants in this WikiProject feel about a bot that adds a standardized short description to outlines that don't already have a short description. I suggest something along the lines of Overview of and topical guide to ___
, where ___ is replaced by the topic, but that's just my 2 cents. Thoughts? --
DannyS712 (
talk)
07:08, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
Why are so many of the outlines assessed as High-importance? Abductive ( reasoning) 23:24, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
I have invited discussion on the scope of some sections of the Outline of Cape Town at Talk:Outline of Cape Town. Clarifying some of those points may have relevance on other outlines of cities, so opinions from this project are also invited. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 15:24, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.
We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma ( talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Outline of Big Science is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Big Science until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 19:21, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like
John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.
)and turns it into something like
It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{ cite web}}, {{ cite journal}} and {{ doi}}.
The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.
Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.
This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 16:02, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at
Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent
Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class=
parameter to {{
WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.
No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{ WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.
However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{
WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom
parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present.
Aymatth2 (
talk)
19:35, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Fluid_dynamics#Outline. fgnievinski ( talk) 02:44, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Outlines § Deprecation of outlines?. {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk
22:40, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
It's fairly well-known that {{
See also}}
is normally verboten at the top of an article, as it's intended for use with an article's sections. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to create a new {{
See index}}
hatnote template to replace it when linking to the corresponding index at the top of outlines?
Remsense
诉
16:08, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
{{
See index}}
is not a bad idea. Feel free to implement it. —
The Transhumanist
14:34, 24 April 2024 (UTC)It has a good selection of relevant links with strange comments attached to them. Social anthropology is a major subfield and it's correct to link it, but at time of writing it describes Social anthropology as "the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom." Some of the descriptions are prescriptive and some are descriptive and plenty more are just wrong.
Has this wikiproject come up with an internal manual of style? 2A02:C7C:4C00:8500:D9BA:D96E:286D:1A33 ( talk) 12:12, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Could someone please check my edits as the forestry project is only semi-active and I have never edited an outline before as far as I remember Chidgk1 ( talk) 12:47, 28 April 2024 (UTC)
Here is a trick to make redirected wikilinks stand out by turning them green instead of blue! This is especially useful when working on navigation aids like lists and outlines, where you need to be sure a link leads to where it says it links to. This quick and easy solution uses customized CSS:
Go to your Preferences, click on the "Appearance" tab, and click the "Custom CSS" to the right of the skin you use. It opens a page to edit, and you can add the following code (just copy and paste it):
.mw-redirect {
color: #006633;
}
.mw-redirect:visited {
color: #009900;
}
.mw-redirect:hover {
color: #990000;
}
.mw-redirect:active {
color: #990000;
}
Save the page, and reload ( bypass your browser cache) and/or ( ) the Wikipedia server to force the new CSS to be included. All redirects will now show up as green links! If you prefer a different color, you can modify them by using six-digit hex codes.
The Outline of transhumanism was deleted via redirect per AfD discussion.
In case you would like to work on the outline in order to fix it...
Copies of the outline can now be found at the Internet Archive, including its edit page (i.e., the wiki text version). — The Transhumanist 07:22, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240509064923//info/en/?search=Outline_of_transhumanism
The wiki source text for Outline of transhumanism can be seen at: