User:CaroleHenson/Outline tips

User page for Outline material. This page is not intended to be an article

Background

The back story...

After the outline team had created a set of country outlines for the geography branch of knowledge, I discovered a whole set of outlines on U.S. State histories that had been built entirely independently from the outline project. I was ecstatic to learn that I wasn't the only one pushing outline development. And they were all made by Buaidh. State histories on all of the states. This was amazing, since these outlines pushed so far out into new subject territory that they skipped a level in the whole "Outline of Knowledge" hierarchy we were building. We had "Outline of the United States", but no outlines on the individual U.S. states. Between the U.S. and state histories, the state branches were missing.

So I created 50 state outlines to bridge the gap, linking the state history outlines into the set, and invited Buaidh to join the Outline WikiProject. He dove into it on a worldly scale and in addition to working on the state outlines, he did a prolific amount of development to the organization membership section of the outline of every country of the world.

In appreciation and recognition for his hard work, the WikiProject presented him with this award.

Eventually, Buaidh copied much of the content of the history outlines into the history section of the state outlines, and then somebody else not connected with the project noticed the duplication and nominated all of the state history outlines for deletion at AfD. They called them "outlines of outlines".

Buaidh didn't seem too happy with the outcome, as he disappeared into Wikipedian category maintenance. Though he's still a member of the outline wikiproject and pops in now and again to work on the Outline of Colorado.

I worked on the merge personally, to ensure that no content was lost, and I expanded the histories with "by region" and "by subject" branches as I went. But there was still this feeling that all this work we were doing could go *poof* and disappear at any time. Maybe he felt that too.

This time around, I think it would be wise not to copy the contents of Outline of Colorado prehistory into the Outline of Colorado. I placed a link in there, and have also placed a link on the master outline (in the history section).

I wish there was something we could do to attract Buaidh back to the project, but it may be that he has moved on for good.

By the way, I've been watching your outline development with much interest. Keep up the excellent work. I look forward to working with you for a long time to come.

Sincerely, The Transhumanist 22:23, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

History of outlines

Let me bring you up to speed...

Way back in 2001 just after Wikipedia got started, co-founder Larry Sanger started a set of "basic topics" lists in the Wikipedia namespace to assist in the creation of key articles for the encyclopedia. The idea was to consult the lists, find a redlink of a topic you were interested in and click on it to start a new article.

There were about 50 lists.

Each time an article was created for a topic listed, the lists turned more and more blue. Once blue, they weren't of any further use in the creation of new basic articles. So they fell into disuse, and were eventually forgotten. They gathered dust for years.

Then late in 2005 shortly after I started editing Wikipedia, I stumbled across them. What I saw was a useful set of blue linked lists. So I moved them all into article space and renamed them all to "List of basic x topics" (where x was each subject's name). Nobody seemed to mind or take much notice.

I created a WikiProject, added the set to Wikipedia's navigation system, and work proceeded apace.

We got some flack here and there, mostly about verifying that the included topics were "basic", but nothing major.

But then something unexpected happened. The lists kept growing and growing, even though the titles clearly indicated that they were intended to be "basic" lists.

There were already generically named topics lists (without "basic" in the titles), but soon the "basic" lists started to become more comprehensive than their formerly bigger brothers. And the number of basic lists was growing fast. (In 2008 we created a basic list on every country of the world). Plus the "basic" lists all shared certain elements and were being developed toward a standardized format - it was a more cohesive set.

It was clear we had to do something, but we couldn't simply merge them into the topics lists. Because there were two kinds competing for the same set of titles. About half of them were hierarchical topics lists (with subject headings), and the others were alphabetical (with letter headings). From a format perspective, "topics" in a title is ambiguous.

So, I renamed the basic topics lists. It took a couple or so renames to finally settle on the "Outline of" title. I realized that that is what we had been building all along: hierarchically structured lists: outlines!

The rename expanded the scope of the articles in the set to allow us to be as comprehensive as desired. As comprehensive as the "topics" lists. So now we were positioned to clean up the "topics" title ambiguity problem.

I started renaming the lists. The alphabetical ones were renamed to "Index of x articles", and eventually a contents page was created for them. The hierarchical ones we started absorbing into the set of outlines, renaming them when there wasn't a corresponding outline, or merging them when there was. Unfortunately, there are still about 180 of them left. Interestingly, nobody complained about the Index renames (there were about 600 of those). But...

...about a year after the adoption of the name "Outline", an editor who hadn't seen them before came across them and was shocked. What was this "new" type of page that wasn't approved by the community? He ignored all explanations that the type of page had existed since the founding of Wikipedia.

The war was on.

He was relentless. He attacked the project in every way he could think of. He recruited allies. He nominated pages for deletion. He renamed them. He redirected them. He changed some of the links on the master outline to lead to articles instead of outlines. He tried to tag the instructions as a failed proposal. He removed the set's links from the navigation system menus. He delinked it from navigation footers. He reformatted them to generic lists. And he engaged in edit wars on almost every outline that I edited.

Supporters of the outlines came out of the woodwork, and we defeated him at every turn. It just so happened that thousands of people had been using the outlines, and there were some who relied upon them heavily for personal and Wikipedia-oriented purposes. From learning to consolidating coverage to tracking articles on Wikipedia. Also, several WikiProjects had gotten involved with developing them for their respective WikiProject's focus.

To turn the tables, I stopped editing, except to repair the damage he was doing. Now the uphill battle was his.

By this time, the outlines had grown to over 500 web pages, and if you printed them out, you'd have a stack of papers numbering between 3000 and 5000, depending on the size of print you chose. So for him, it was like an ant attacking an elephant.

After about a year of this, there was still some minor damage on about 50 of the pages. He had managed to slightly reformat about 10% of the project. At that rate, it would take him 10 years to convert the whole thing. Then one day he announced he was a father, and disappeared.

Development had slowed to a crawl that whole year, and so we hadn't kept up with the community's expectations for such a project. It remained pretty rough, and there were many who believed it should all be hidden away behind the scenes.

The animosity our opposer had generated still lingers, and about every six months or so opposers to the project make another major attack. The last one took up most of October 2011.

There was a lot of critiquing in there, and so I've been using it as the basis for a task list to further develop the set. One of the opposers pointed out a problem with circular redirects, so I've been tracking those down. Another thought there were too many redlinks in the state outlines. So I nuked the redlinks. While on that chore, I polished the state outlines. Then I turned to refining the rest of the set.

Once the outlines are well-developed, I believe most opposition will simply fade away, while support will grow even stronger. And as the set continues to grow, it will attract even more new readers.

Currently and collectively, the set of outlines get about 6 million page views per year. I did an experiment for one of the outlines, placing more links to it around the encyclopedia, and its daily traffic doubled immediately.

As soon as the whole set is of showcase quality, I'll turn my attention to integrating it more fully into the encyclopedia by linking to it wherever relevant. That should easily double the traffic, and bring the benefits of outlines to twice as many people.

Keep in mind that I can use all the help I can get.

Sincerely, The Transhumanist 22:23, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Wow! Sounds like you've been very busy with this. Thanks for the background! Yes, I'll definitely keep it in mind.--CaroleHenson (talk) 22:43, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I was afraid it would be TLDR. The Transhumanist 01:14, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Outline development

Merge like, estranged lists

Sometimes I find estranged lists that are better served by being merged into the outline. I recently merged Subfields of sociology (a real mess) into Outline of sociology#Branches of sociology. When making such a merge, it is best to improve it as much as possible (if the merge was an obvious improvement, then nobody is likely to complain). In this case, the list was cleaned up and expanded.

Annotations (and discussion)

After gathering links for a subject, you may find that many of the terms you don't know, and that it is difficult to place them under the appropriate headings in the outline because you have to jump to each to read what it is about, then jump back, and so on. You may find that it saves time to grab the annotation for each one while you do so to kill two birds with one stone.

Sometimes the headings aren't created yet, because you don't know what they will be until you've surveyed the topics. In such cases, annotating all the terms in a list first really helps to sort them into their respective classifications, which become evident from the annotations.

I hope you find this tip useful. The Transhumanist 23:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Yep, the concept makes sense and is good to be mindful of - I do it sometimes, but possibly not enough. I'm assuming your referring to a generic practice of annotation and not a specific WP function.--CaroleHenson (talk) 00:14, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

They are common in lists, but currently there is no MOS standard style for annotations. For the outlines, we've informally standardized around the en-dash, where the annotation starts (with small case rather than a capital letter). The Transhumanist 19:24, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh, ok. I went and made some edits to Outline of Colorado prehistory based on your comments. That article is taking a lot longer than I would have expected, largely because I'm working on beefing up the Prehistory of Colorado article and adding or cleaning up supporting articles as I go... but it also makes it a lot more interesting that way. Anyway... if you have a chance to take a peak at the outline and let me know if you have any comments regarding content, or anything you might spot, that would be very helpful! Thanks for all your support and tips along the way.--CaroleHenson (talk) 19:49, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Will do. And you are welcome. The Transhumanist 20:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I did a little. I'll read it (the periods section) in more depth as time allows. The Transhumanist 21:54, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Cool, I'll take a look.--CaroleHenson (talk) 01:26, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Great! Thanks for your input to the outline!--CaroleHenson (talk) 01:39, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Develop the External links section

• Add links to external hierarchical outlines (structured lists), if possible. The two kinds are topic outlines and sentence outlines. Both kinds are fine.

The external links section also provides an opportunity to present further links to the subject, without bloating the external links section of the main article. Introductory web pages are good, and high impact pages (pages that provide solutions).

Timing: when to create on user space vs. directly in Wikipedia (and discussion, just for archival)

I often create an outline directly in article space. That keeps me motivated to complete it in a single session if possible.

If the situation is sensitive, or I expect the outline will take a long time to reach a good general treatment of the subject, or I just want to set a placeholder to remind me of a needed outline in the future, I start the draft in the WikiProject's draft space. Bare bones outline drafts (that start out with just headings) make good repositories for relevant links as you find them.

An example of a potentially sensitive outline I started today is Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of Wikipedia. I intend to complete it there and move it once it exemplifies how useful outlines can be. I've already discovered some ways to use Wikipedia more effectively that I didn't know or hadn't thought of. I believe the outline will help inexperienced users get up to speed faster than the bare links alternatives currently available. The Transhumanist 23:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Yep, I probably should have started the Outline of Colorado prehistory in user space.

I LOVE the outline idea that you're working on and had started some drafts of materials to help users -- but for several reasons they didn't go anywhere. It would be interesting to know more, and help if you'd like some help.--CaroleHenson (talk) 00:06, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Where are the drafts you mentioned?

Yes, I can always use as much help as I can get. The size of the outline team ebbs and flows and right now, it's just me (not counting the adopters of individual outlines, who are just as invaluable to the project). In summer 2008 the core team grew to 9 to develop an outline on every country of the world, but dwindled back down to me within about a year as each member went back to their other commitments. Belonging to a core team again would be great. The project is too big for one person to keep up with, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed.

Welcome to the team!

Keep in mind that in addition to those who work on outlines, the project has supporters who come to its defense during discussions and debates. It certainly wouldn't exist without their help. They don't usually get involved until an issue goes mainstream (posted on one of the project's main talk pages or as an RfC). Some of the same people have showed up year after year to defend the project, and we'd be lost without them.

But we (the core team) are on the front lines all the time. It is up to us to handle local issues, such as on individual outlines' talk pages, and with the various WikiProjects (we overlap with all of the subject-oriented WikiProjects), and to be the first to respond to any complaint or conflict that arises to help set the tone and clarify situations to smooth things out.

It is also up to us to adapt the outlines to constructive criticism directed at the project as a whole.

If that wasn't enough, the bulk of our work is to develop and maintain the project's support pages (including all the relevant guidelines) and the outlines themselves. Most of the outlines are incomplete, and the set as a whole still has gaping holes in it (i.e., missing outlines).

In addition to all that, I'd love to see the project add outliner functionality to outlines, that is, make them dynamic/interactive. To give the user more control, such as toggling annotations on and off, collapsing and expanding the number of levels viewed at once, entry truncation (setting # of lines viewed per entry), on-the-fly selection of auto-prefixing options, etc. And node-processing commands (powerful editing features based on the parsability of outline levels). Toward this end, I'm learning programming. I've started with regular expressions, because they are also immediately applicable in many applications in search/replace operations to achieve a fairly high degree of automation in developing and cleaning up outlines, including multi-line variable-inclusive search/replaces. (AWB is quite powerful in this regard).

Even with AWB, I'm spread rather thin.

I gladly take you up on your offer.

So let's get started! The Transhumanist 20:36, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Post updates to articles on noticeboard

I recently started an outlines notice area at Wikipedia:Community portal#Community bulletin board. Be sure to post links there to new outlines that you create or overhaul. Thank you. The Transhumanist 02:02, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Links / Traffic

Gathering information and links

Good places to look for links include:

• grep - see http://toolserver.org/~nikola/grep.php?pattern=(Domestic+violence|domestic+violence)&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia&ns=0 – this can be used to do very precise title searches.

Grep is a tool available on Wikipedia's toolserver.

It has three major abilities/features:

1. It searches only page titles on Wikipedia
2. It presents its output as a simple single-column list
3. It understands Regular expressions (for a cheatsheet, see WP:REGEX)

You don't have to worry about Regex to be able to use it. Just type in whatever string you want it to search for. To specify more than one search string in the same search, use (|), like this: (of Colorado|in Colorado)

That returns a list with titles like Geography of Colorado, Education in Colorado, etc. Grep also takes spaces into account... " Colorado" (without the quotes) would look for Colorado with a space character in front of it. To find places in Colorado, search for ", Colorado" (though that won't find all of the places).

To look for a search string that includes parentheses, you have to escape the special meaning of the parentheses characters by placing a backslash in front of each.

Grep is a nice simple place to start experimenting with Regex. Once you get familiar with it, you'll be ready to apply Regex in WP:WikEd and AWB. (Once you get up to speed with outlines, you'll probably be using AWB a lot, as it is very powerful even without using Regex).

• See also sections (not just of the main article) – sometimes these are treasure troves, because editors often know of no better place to put the links, which is especially true before the outline existed. Often, links have built up there for years. When a See also section is bloated or is just a hodge podge of random links about the subject, sometimes I just clean it out and move them all to the relavant outline. In essence, an outline is the ultimate "See also" repository.
• The Category

Where to provide links to the outline

Basic places to provide links to an outline include:

• Master outline  Done
• Main article's See also section  Done
• Subject's navigation footer  Done – outlines are about the entire subject, and are even more comprehensive than the nav footer. Therefore, they are most relevant as the first entry right at the top. The group name "Overview" works well for this. On some footers, the outline is linked to the group name itself like this: [[Outline of domestic violence|Overview]]. I don't know if that attracts more traffic than having it in the template body instead. It will take some experimentation to find out.
• See also sections of articles corresponding to the outline's subheadings, of sub-articles, and major related articles. For example, Christianity and domestic violence#See also, Cycle of abuse#See also, etc. Usually, because it is already embedded in the article, the outline's subject won't be included in the see also section, per WP:SEEALSO. Then it's the outline to the rescue. Even when the subject is there, you can indent a link to the outline beneath it.

Link placement strategy

http://stats.grok.se/en/201112/Outline_of_domestic_violence

I adjusted the location of the link on the footer template to the top, and hopefully the traffic increase is more than merely a temporary surge.

A link placement strategy I forgot to mention is that once the outline link is well-placed on the navigation footer, it is usually advantageous to add the footer to every relevant article you can find.

I hope you find this useful. Sincerely, The Transhumanist 02:07, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Absolutely! Thanks!--CaroleHenson (talk) 02:09, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Check traffic

After placing links...

...see: http://stats.grok.se/en/201112/Domestic_violence

Keep in mind that most of the outline's traffic is coming from within Wikipedia, so links to it around the encyclopedia are vital.

General tips

Browse faster

Another way to look for links is to browse faster. WP:LINKY speeds up browsing of multiple pages a lot.

Blank template

Help out

Watchlist outline pages

The outlines and their support pages need more eyes watching them.

A quick and dirty watch page is here, but it only includes outlines in article space, and it keys in on a template placed on their talk pages (making it vulnerable). If anyone removes the template, the pages it was removed from won't show up on the watchlist.

A better method is to add all the outlines and outline support pages to your (raw) watchlist. I've just updated the list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Watchlist for easy cutting and pasting into raw watchlists.

Still another method is to go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Watchlist using Related changes and click "Related changes" in the Toolbox menu. It's essentially a linkified copy of the raw watchlist above.

• First, do a Google search using some (long strings) of the text to see if it is copyrighted. (I checked several strings from this one). Sara's passage appears to be derived from http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/readings/church.htm . When you find copyrighted material or plagiarized material, delete it and post a standard warning on the user's talk page. For more information, see Wikipedia:Copyright problems. If there are no apparent copyright problems, do a Wikipedia search to see if it was copied from an article. If it isn't already on Wikipedia, then it's new text which should be merged into whichever article is most appropriate. Contacting editors is good. Let them know that "outline" as used here is short for "hierarchical outline", a type of list, and then provide a link to where you merged the material. In this case, since it appears to be plagiarized, point this out and provide a link to the suspected source of the material and to the Copyright problems page. The Transhumanist 01:24, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
• Be sure to check the user's contributions to see if this is part of a vandalism spree. If it is, report them at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. For more information, see Wikipedia:Vandalism#How_to_respond_to_vandalism. The Transhumanist 01:24, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Add annotations to existing outlines

The existing outlines need annotations. I'm not worried about the geographical region outlines, since most of their links are self explanatory (e.g., "Culture of France"). It is more important to concentrate on annotating non-geographic region outlines.

But, since there are so many (200+) such outlines and because they could take a single editor a year or more to annotate, I've been concentrating on the outlines in just the "culture and the arts" section. That way, we can provide a feel for what a whole class of complete outlines feels like. Then we can move on to another area.

Add external links to existing articles

A much easier project is adding external links to outlines that lack them in their external links sections. Even the empty ones have a sisterlinks box, so they aren't completely empty, so there is no rush. The ideal links are to outlines on the subject. Links to introductions and overviews also work.