Talk:Outline of World War I

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 Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 16:50, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Categories
I've restored the categories that have been in place for years per WP:BRD and WP:Consensus, that were removed by Brigade Piron. The subject of this article is World War I. "Outline of" just refers to the format the subject is presented in.

The outline articles are root articles in the sense that they are about the subject specified in their titles. So "Outline of World War I" is about World War I, and not about an "Outline". "Outline" is a format specification, not part of the subject.

I've further refined the category entries so that they appear right after "World War I" in the listings. Previously, they appeared under "O" instead of "W". The Transhumanist 16:48, 3 August 2016 (UTC)