This is a draft, under development.

"Wikipedia:Outlines" redirects here. (All outline pages on Wikipedia are part of this encyclopedia's Outline of knowledge).

Shortcuts WP:OOK WP:OUTLINE Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge is a hierarchical list of the points or topics comprising all human knowledge (though it is incomplete and under development). It has grown so large that it is divided into many pages, each page itself an outline. Each individual outline does for its subject what the Outline of knowledge does for knowledge as a whole. All outline pages on Wikipedia are part of this encyclopedia's Outline of knowledge and should be linked together (hierarchically) to form it. Outlines are core pages to their subjects. However, unlike portals, they are a type of article, meant for readers. And as a type of article, outlines are encyclopedic content, presented in the main namespace.

An outline of knowledge is a hierarchical list of the subject "knowledge". Its scope is everything known by humankind. Outlines of knowledge are typically large, though some are more in-depth than others.

Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge has been under construction (under various names) since October 2001.

Another example is Encyclopaedia Britannica's Outline of Knowledge, presented in its Propædia volume.

Differences between Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge and Britannica's Outline of Knowledge

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Britannica's Outline of Knowledge is currently broader (covering the spectrum of subjects more evenly) and more refined. The original took a large team 8 years to complete, and has 517 pages (including suggested reading lists, which aren't part of the subject classification outline itself). Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge has been under development as part of the encyclopedia proper (in article space) since 2005, with the bulk of the development being done by a small team of contributors, and so far it has grown to about 500 pages (as of April 2009). Wikipedia's outline goes into more depth on some subjects, but has many blatant gaps Britannica's does not have.

The Britannica's outline uses outline numbering, Wikipedia's does not (except in outline pages' auto-generated tables of contents - these are displayed in the decimal outline format, and only show those topics/branches that are presented as headings). As manual numbering is infeasible and renders the auto-generated TOC unreadable, a new software feature would be needed to enable automatic outline numbering in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge is comprised of many subject outlines, referred to simply as "outlines". Each outline is a form of stand-alone list, a type of article on Wikipedia. Outlines are usually named "Outline of x", where "x" is the name of the subject being covered.

Pertaining to outlines, Wikipedia's guideline on lists leads back here. Just like other articles and other stand-alone lists, outlines are subject to the five pillars of Wikipedia, and must comply with Wikipedia's core content policies Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Verifiability.

More specifically, an outline is a hierarchical list of the essential points of a subject or written work. The points may be in the form of topics (terms) or sentences.

The idea of an outline is to break a subject down into its component parts, and organize those components to show the structure of the subject and how its parts are related to each other - to provide a logical framework. That logical framework is the hierarchy, which displays parentage between entries - it shows what belongs to what. Parentage is shown with heading levels or with list indentation.

And because topics are typically linkified, like other lists, outlines also serve as tables of contents to subject coverage on Wikipedia, and are useful navigation aids. The Outline of knowledge is one of Wikipedia's navigation systems, and assists browsing.

See the top page of Wikipedia's Outline of knowledge - the main subjects are presented there, and in turn lead to more refined topics. The top page can be accessed from Portal:Contents which has a link on Wikipedia's sidebar in the navigation menu ("Contents" is the second link on the menu, right below "Main page").

You can see a list of most outlines in Wikipedia's alphabetical index. See also Special:PrefixIndex/Historical outline of.

Outlines are also listed at Category:Outlines.

Outlines under development are usually listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge. Outlines with empty heading skeletons tend to get deleted from article space. Therefore it is best to create new outlines in the WP:WPOOK's draft collection.

The titles of outlines on Wikipedia usually start with "Outline of".

The title is never plural ("Outlines of" or "X-related outlines", or "List of x outlines" or "List of outlines of"), since all outlines are components of an overall single outline (the top-most page of which is Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge) and should be integrated into it (connected like the branches of a tree). That is, if one or more outlines are branches of the same subject, links to them should be included on the outline for that subject.

Why not other name forms?

A title with "topic outline" is inappropriate 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 or descriptive lead or section lead, 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, which immediately renders that title false. Also, people tend to associate the term "outline" with sentence outlines, which makes "sentence outline" redundant.

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. 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.

Standardizing outlines to a single name also helps to prevent the need to merge redundant outlines with similar titles ("topic outline of x", "subject outline of x", "outline of x topics", "sentence outline of x", etc.) - the simple form "Outline of x" will do.

Important: Please don't create outline stubs in article space. Outlines that are bare skeletons and sparsely populated outlines are likely to get AfD'd, even while you are working on them. It's better to create each new outline as a draft in the draft collection of the Outline of knowledge WikiProject, and move the draft to article space after it has plenty of meat on it. Before creating an outline draft, be sure to check that no outline or draft already exists for that subject. A list of outline drafts can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge.

General outlines are created using the {{Outline generator}} template, like this:

{{subst:Outline generator|topic uncapitalized|topic capitalized}}

Outlines on countries are created using the {{Outline generator}} template, like this:

{{subst:Template:Outline country|country name}}

If you see a gap in the Outline of knowledge, and the gap is also in the draft collection, feel free to create a redlink for the subject in the draft list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge. Then you can click on it and create the page, or leave it for others to create.

For advice on country outlines, see Country outline development (below)

Outline format

[manually numbering the items (including headings) in an outline is not practical or advisable, as it wreaks havoc with the article toc feature of MediaWiki, is error prone, and makes outline pages exceedingly tedious to revise - every time an item were to be inserted into a branch, that level of that branch would have to be renumbered.]

[the key element is hierarchical ordering. The hierarchy can be shown with headings, indents, and list bullets (or numbering).]

[Standard format]

[Priorization of links: when an outline of a topic exists, link to that. If there isn't one, and there's a list, link to that. Failing that, link to an article. If none of the types exists, leave it as an article redlink (as those are most likely to turn blue first).]

To create a new country outline, see How to create an outline page (above).

Most countries already have outlines created for them, but they need further development...

Major problems:

• bloated lead section
• incorrectly named and/or empty Administrative divisions section
• incorrect data in Government branches sections

There is some awkward stuff in the incomplete outlines:

• redlinks
• empty brackets
• apparently irrelevant entries (e.g., "fjords" for a landlocked country)
• blank entries

When encountered in article space, many editors tend to delete the awkward stuff instead of complete it. You need to be on the look out for this. One way to check for this is to compare the outline against the template:Outline country. Comparing with that will show you what standard items have been removed.

Here's a good basic order by which to complete an outline in:

Lead section

For most country outlines, as a convenient starting point the lead section was copied from the corresponding country article. These lead sections should be condensed down to a single paragraph including just enough for good solid country identification. Unfortunately, we haven't developed a standard for this yet (perhaps general location, main distinguishing characteristics, and something the country is famous for) - more thought is needed on this. It was never intended to leave the full article leads in these outlines. We simply copied and pasted the leads from the articles to provide an easy starting point for editing. Some of the leads are monstrous - these pages are supposed to be outlines, not articles or article forks. Any topics in the lead that are essential to the country as a subject should be converted to outline entries and included in the body of the outline (if they are not already there).

Administrative divisions

The administrative divisions sections for many countries are incorrect on the drafts, and the sections are empty. These need to be corrected and filled.

If there are way too many divisions to list, provide a link instead.

Provide a map if you can find one (for each admin div section).

Government branches sections

These too start out in error for many countries. They must be corrected before the outline can be moved to article space.

Maps!

Each country outline should include:

1. Location map
2. General map (with roads, rivers, cities, etc.) - usually placed next to or below the table of contents
3. Satellite photo or topological map - usually placed in the Geography section
4. Map(s) showing administrative divisions - one for each administrative division section, if available
5. Population density map (or some other demographics-related map) - in the demographics section
6. Etc.

Look for these at Wikimedia Commons. A faster way to get to what you need is to click on the atlas link in the country outline.  ;)

Sometimes the selection to choose from is pitiful. Do the best with what you have to work with.

The best examples of map support so far are Topic outline of the Isle of Man and Topic outline of Japan.

Fill-ins

All blank entries and empty link brackets need to be filled in.

Bluelink the redlinks

Generally, either move a page to the name of the redlink, or click on the redlink and create a redirect to the article and section where the information is.

Entries that don't seem like they belong, we still keep for comparison purposes. These outlines serve as profiles, and the standard entries and the standard order they are in let you compare country profiles easily. So rather than remove "Glaciers" for countries that have none, instead add a colon and type in "none". This also helps remove ambiguity. If the glacier item is missing, the reader may not know whether it means that there are no glaciers, or if the outline just isn't complete yet. We're trying to make these outlines as unambiguous as possible.

Finish the coverage

These outlines were created using a template that had all the links most likely to be found for most of the countries of the world. But countries are highly individualized, and there are lots of non-standard topics on Wikipedia about them. We need to find them for each country. Here are some searching tips:

Be careful not to go beyond the essential topics

These outlines are not indexes, and they shouldn't include every article related to the country. We have alphabetical indexes and specialized lists for that. For example, in the outline of the United States, don't include the name of every municipality in the country, because there are thousands of them. That's too much data!

But small countries might only have a handful of cities, towns, and villages. Sure, add them in.

Google

Use Google to search Wikipedia (yes you can use Google to search specific websites - Google is actually much more useful for searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia's own search box is.)

Basically, in Google you type in "of x" (including the quotes!). (Where "x" is a country name). Then click on Advanced search, and configure it to "title only" and add Wikipedia's URL to the domain field. As you get up to speed with this technique, you'll probably start editing the url directly in the url field at the top of your browser, but you could skip to an advanced method and make an url list of google searches on a user page and load them with Linky (this technique speeds up multi-Google searches immensely).

In the results, you'll recognize a lot of the article names on there (guess how I found the article names for the country outlines in the first place!) Look over the results, keeping an eye out for article names that are not already included in the country outline you are working on.

(Using "-subject", where "subject" is the name of a subject, you can eliminate a lot of the standard subjects already in use, to make it easier to spot new ones in your results).

Then repeat for "in x", and look them over as above.

Other search terms that may be useful include the country's name (without "of" or "in"), the country's adjectival(s) (e.g. "German", "Germanic"), the country's demonym(s), etc.

Check the country's categories

You can usually find blatantly missing topics in Wikipedia's category system.

Browse the subject's articles on Wikipedia

By this point the outline itself is already a powerful research tool. Click on its links to find more links for the outline. For example, History of Russia is a great place to look for links for the history section. And don't forget to read the main article on the country!

Images

Images are best saved for last, because once you've added all the links and maps to the outline, then you know how much room you need to fill with images. But it's OK to add them sooner or as you go - pictures are worth a thousand words and they liven up the page. Just keep in mind that as more links are added, so is more space which needs to be filled with images.

For images, the standard size we've been using is 300px. If the image can't be seen at that size, make it bigger. Placement is usually to the right, but large images usually work best centered at the top or bottom of a section. Be creative, but make it look good.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Try to find pictures that are not already in use in the main country-related articles. You can usually find some at Commons, and in more-specific articles (like place articles, or animal type, etc.). Go a few clicks deep.  ;)

The best examples of image placement are Topic outline of France, Topic outline of Iceland, Topic outline of Japan, Topic outline of Taiwan, and Topic outline of Thailand.

Just as with any article on Wikipedia, outlines can be created and edited by anyone, so the easiest way to get involved is find an outline, click "edit", and start typing away. Please keep in mind that outlines have standard formats (by type) to make it easy to compare subjects. This is especially so for outlines on countries.

The Outline of knowledge WikiProject was founded to coordinate outline activity. Its main objectives are to build the Outline of knowledge by creating new outlines for it, expand existing outlines, develop standards for outlines, and maintain them all.

Because many subjects have similar structures, their outlines have similar formats and share elements. The development and maintenance of these can often be automated. There is a team of editors dedicated to the use of advanced wikitools to improve Wikipedia's outlines. If you are interested, they can be reached via the Outline of knowledge WikiProject's talk page, or simply drop a note to The Transhumanist.

Important: Outlines of countries need immediate attention to their government branches sections. These need to be corrected and completed as soon as possible.

• Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge (the top page of the Outline of knowledge)

Outlines
Portal | WikiProject | Category