Talk:List of electrical engineering topics

Article title
You don't think "Outline of electrical engineering" is a little bit of a grand title for a Wikipedia list? Really it's just a list of things that someone has been moved to contribute; "outline" implies a much more formal process of generating a comprehensive overview of a subject field. H.G. Wells' "Outline of History", sure...but a list of random EE topics does not an outline make. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:44, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Different context. "Outline" is also short for "hierarchical outline", which is a different species of animal altogether. It is a tree structure, in the form of a structured list, the branches of which represent parent-offspring relationships between the contents of its branches.
 * Because "hierarchical outline" is cumbersome, the educational and encyclopedia fields commonly simplify the term to "outline". "Hierarchical outline" would make article titles on Wikipedia exceedingly long and awkward, so we also use the short form.
 * There are two main types of hierarchical outlines: sentence outlines, like those taught in school to plan a paper, and topic outlines, like those provided by professors as synopses of their courses. World Book Encyclopedia provides outlines at the end of major articles. Encyclopedia Britannica's "Outline of Knowledge", presented in its Propaedia volume, is a massive topic outline, which they used both to plan the development of the encyclopedia and as a study aid and guide once it was completed. Wikipedia's outlines are evolving into a hybrid between sentence and topic outlines, melding aspects of each, by presenting topics followed by descriptive annotations.
 * Structured general topics lists (outlines) have been on Wikipedia since the beginning, and were renamed to outlines in 2008 due to a naming conflict with alphabetical indexes.
 * Currently there are just over 600 outlines on Wikipedia.
 * I hope I've helped to shed light on this context of the word "outline". Sincerely, The Transhumanist 18:44, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Well done! It's the first time I see such a good motivated move, and it brings my understanding of Wikipedia's outlines on a higher level. Transhumanist, I fully support this move. Kind Regards, SchreyP (messages) 19:31, 22 June 2012 (UTC)