

They provide a more organized presentation of a subject's subtopics than either articles or portals. Outlines on Wikipedia combine the benefits of tables of contents, site maps, and glossaries.

They help you select what to consume next. Wikipedia's outlines are kind of like restaurant menus. But with the addition of annotations, and by virtue of the hierarchical arrangement of their entries, outlines on Wikipedia go beyond being mere site maps and are evolving into classified glossaries. While portals are collections of excerpts, sort of like the Reader's Digest, outlines are more like site maps. Wikipedia has correlates to both of those implementations: WP article TOCs compete with World Book's outlines, while a Wikipedia outline article will compete with a Britannica Propædia section, to scope the same subject. The World Book Encyclopedia has traditionally provided a sparse outline at the end of each of its articles, while the Encyclopædia Britannica's approach has been to provide an extensive stand-alone Outline of Knowledge divided into many numbered subject sections in its Propædia volume. General reference encyclopedias vary in their application of hierarchical outlines, including Wikipedia's two main competitors. Entries that have a corresponding article are linked to that article. Entries may be in the form of topics (terms) or statements (sentences) or a combination of the two (using annotations).
#Outlines software
This is consistent with how the academic community and other encyclopedias refer to hierarchical outlines.ĭue to the software features used on Wikipedia, outlines here use subheadings and bullet-list indentation to convey hierarchy. Because using "Hierarchical outline of." makes article titles too long (e.g., "Hierarchical outline of the Central African Republic") we use the short form "Outline of.". An outline is a type of tree structure, designed to graphically convey subjects' connectedness, showing the parent–offspring relationships between topics, and their subtopics. The term " outline", as used here, is short for "hierarchical outline", which is a type of hierarchical list arranged in levels using indents. Outlines on Wikipedia are stand-alone lists designed to help a reader learn about a subject quickly, by showing what topics it includes, and how those topics are related to each other. The Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines is an entryway to this system. The system of outlines are also linked together hierarchically. This page in a nutshell: An outline is a list article, arranged hierarchically, that helps a reader learn about a subject quickly, by showing what topics it includes, and how the topics relate to each other.
