Talk:Outline of free software

Computing Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Outlines List‑class Mid‑importance

	This article is an outline, a type of article that presents a list of articles or sub-topics related to its subject in a hierarchical form. For the standardized set of outlines on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines. Outlines are within the scope of WikiProject Outlines, a collaborative effort to improve outlines on Wikipedia. For guidance on building and maintaining outlines, see Wikipedia:Outlines.OutlinesWikipedia:WikiProject OutlinesTemplate:WikiProject OutlinesOutlines articles
List	This article has been given a rating which conflicts with the project-independent quality rating in the banner shell. Please resolve this conflict if possible.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Please place new discussions at the bottom of the talk page.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Outline of free software article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Major rename proposal of certain "lists" to "outlines"

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Major rename proposal of certain "lists" to "outlines".

The Transhumanist 01:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rename proposal for this page and all the pages of the set this page belongs to

See the proposal at the Village pump

The Transhumanist 09:17, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Guidelines for outlines

Guidelines for the development of outlines are being drafted at Wikipedia:Outlines.

Your input and feedback is welcomed and encouraged.

The Transhumanist 00:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The "History of" section needs links!

Please add some relevant links to the history section.

Links can be found in the "History of" article for this subject, in the "History of" category for this subject, or in the corresponding navigation templates. Or you could search for topics on Google - most topics turn blue when added to Wikipedia as internal links.

The Transhumanist 00:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't an outline

This isn't an outline, it's a list of lists. Yworo (talk) 01:34, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The type of outlines called "Outline of" on Wikipedia are hierarchical outlines, a type of tree structure. The hierarchy of the subject of this outline is maintained through headings and bullets. Outlines come with a variety of indexing (numbering) schemes for their branches and leaves, the most prevalent being the alphanumeric system, though MediaWiki doesn't have a feature for autonumbering outlines, so we've adopted a sans-numbering outline format.

If you have any questions about outlines, feel free to ask me on my talk page.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist 02:35, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's a list and should be renamed. Verbal chat 18:49, 6 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What's meant by scholars?

I think the "scholars" section will be hard to maintain when this article attracts further contributors.

A lot of the people in the non-scholars list also have university degrees, and some still work in universities. What does one have to do to be a scholar for the free software movement? What about those four people makes it useful for them to be treated apart from the people in the other list? It just seems arbitrary and not useful. Gronky (talk) 02:50, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Donald Knuth? Didn't he make TeX freely available (in most senses of that term) back in the 80s? Mcswell (talk) 23:14, 2 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines

"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Wikipedia:Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:06, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]