Talk:Outline of communication

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Simplifying this page
May I humbly suggest that this page be divided / simplified. Personally, I find the sheer number of links present a tad overwhelming. However, I'm not sure I can think of a more concise method of organization off hand. Perhaps a page that talks about theory, a page that talks about history (the current 'history of communication' page is a tad misleading as far as the academic discipline of communication), and a page that talks about communication scholars.

Suggestion
topics which will help the beginner become familiar with the field of communications. For a comprehensive list, see List of communication topics.
 * This list helps the beginner become familiar with communications as much as a list of functions helps someone learn how to program for the first time. Can we at least organize/sort the topics into more logical groupings instead of alphabetical lists? - Magic5ball 23:28, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Doing an online course
And in the course of my course, one of the links I was sent to was this page, from here, so just wanted to give a shout of "right on" to whoever maintains/watchs this page...congratulations on a thorough list. JamieJones talk 00:44, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * As per the above, I would like to present the following:

JamieJones talk 03:40, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Ocean of Links
The links in this page are like an ocean. Its very difficult to find anything. I'm going to attempt to bullet these, and possible group them further so that it is easy to read, but also not 10 pages long.Chapium 20:22, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Types vs Modes of communication
What distinguishes a mode of communication from a type of communication? The section on this seems to overlap.

I think this article is overly detailed. Television and radio are listed (types of Electronic Mass communication), Telephone (another form of electronic communication), etc. I think the main areas are missed in this article. This article really needs to be merged into Communication and Communication studies (unless this page serves another purpose that I am unaware of). Chapium 20:43, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

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

The Transhumanist 01:20, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

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 09:10, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

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

Your input and feedback is welcomed and encouraged.

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

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)

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 00:04, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Outline of communication. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070927224727/http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/communicating/Communicating_for_change_and_impact.doc to http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/communicating/Communicating_for_change_and_impact.doc

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Outline of human communication
User:SuggestBot pointed me towards Human communication as a page I might want to edit, which is tagged for cleanup. While a full article might be worth writing, it occurred to me that it might be a good case for an outline. It already gives a list of blue-linked topics to read for communication broken up by group type (with oneself, with multiple people, within a group, within an organization, etc), and it could be broken up in other ways similarly (mode: written, verbal, gestural, ...; intent: informative, expressive, persuasive, ...; register: formal, informal, slang, vulgarity, ...; relationship to truth: nonsense, lies, evasiveness, honesty, ...; transmission: physical writing, live speech, recorded speech, video, digital equivalents, ...; target-type: human-human, human-machine, human-animal, ...; ...) plus related topics such as translation, linguistics, the history of these various things, ... . Even in outline this might be too broad to be manageable, but perhaps with judicious links to sub-outlines it could work. Since it's such a large topic, I don't know that a prose article can reasonably work. Of course, having said that, even more expansive topics such as philosophy, art and science do have solid prose articles, so perhaps I'm just being timid. What do you think? Would your normal prescription be to aim to have both, one for encyclopedic description and the other for navigability? I don't really believe I'm qualified to do justice to either but I'm interested in learning more about the outline approach and how it slots in to other types of article writing, and this seemed like an interesting example. Mortee (talk) 00:23, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Outline of communication covers exactly what you were talking about, and so I've moved this thread to its talk page. Yes, "communication" is of wider scope than "human communication", but currently that's the only kind of communication covered by the outline.  It looks like this outline needs a section on "animal communication" and another on "automated communication".  I think those can be added without making the outline too long.  When an outline gets too long, we simply split part of it off into a new outline, per WP:SPLIT.
 * By the way, there is no subject too broad for Wikipedia to handle, in any of its root formats (prose article, outline, index, category, portal, etc.), again, due to WP:SPLIT and WP:SUMMARY. I highly recommend working on both human communication and the outline of communication. And don't forget about telecommunication, and outline of telecommunication.
 * In answer to your question, yes, on broad subjects where there are at least 30 Wikipedia articles about the subject, I would aim to have an outline in addition to a prose article.
 * Concerning qualifications, you are eminently qualified to edit articles on any topic on Wikipedia: you know how to read and write, you are interested, and you are willing to work for free! You're hired!
 * I wrote an article recently, automatic taxonomy construction, without knowing much of anything about the subject when I started. I knew a lot more when I was done. And then an amazing thing happened: others came along and improved it. And so, it is a much better article now. It's the wiki way: collaboration.  We are all part of a big team.  As long as you don't mind others editing your work, then you'll do fine here.
 * I look forward to seeing your work on any subject you might be interested in. Have fun. The Transhumanist 05:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * thank you; I hadn't seen the Outline of Communication page but you're correct of course that this is the right place for the dicussion. I'm still (very slowly) exploring the outline concept so wasn't sure if it currently accommodated recursion enough to handle very abstract concepts but I agree that there's no reason why it shouldn't and it doesn't need fundamental changes to allow editors to build that in. Mortee (talk) 17:50, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually, this triggered another thought: since outlines are in a way analagous to categories (hierarchical categorisations of information intended to aid exploration) but are clearly different in form, has there been discussion before about the idea of having a separate page-space for outlines? For a lot of abstract pages X, having a category X and an outline X both make sense. Perhaps outlines should live at Outline:x rather than trying to co-exist in the main article space with other pages that have a very different intent, style, set of policies etc. It might make sense for outlines to live in a parallel space in that way, but presumably that would require some serious buy-in from Wikimedia and their devs, which in turn would need them (outlines) to prove their worth in a substantial way as compared to other means of navigating between articles... Hmm. I'll ponder this some more. Mortee (talk) 00:31, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This idea has come up in the past, and has been discussed ad nauseam. Here are the basics as I understand them... Knowledge (the encyclopedia's content) can be formatted in two ways: as prose or lists. Lists fall under the MOS:LIST, WP:EMBED, and WP:STAND guidelines. Lists are an ecosystem of encyclopedia content, the parts of which can be embedded in articles or stand alone as articles, and include item lists, outlines, indexes, glossaries, tables, and timelines. As an ecosystem of content, lists are an integral part of the encyclopedia itself, which is why their home is the main namespace, intermixed with prose.
 * Stand-alone lists are articles, and outlines are simply branched lists. Lists of all types migrate in and out of prose articles, and item lists migrate in and out of outlines. "Outline of" articles are topic lists, and "List of" articles are item lists. Items are topics too, and so many item lists are included in outlines.  There is no difference between a "List of" article and a branch of an outline.  Outlines contain thousands of item lists.  Hundreds of item lists have been split off from outlines, and hundreds more have been merged into them.
 * Thus, Wikipedia's content is an integrated mixture of prose and lists. Portals have their own namespace because of WP:SRTA &mdash; they mix elements of the project in with encyclopedic content. Categories have their own namespace because they are auto-generated, and can't be edited directly (which makes them not articles – Wikipedia is the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"). Neither prose articles or list articles have their own namespace, because they are both encyclopedic content, and are thus both included in the main namespace, that is, in the encyclopedia itself. I hope this explanation helps. Thank you for asking. The Transhumanist 05:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It was very generous of you to boil this down for me. I expected there would have been conversations before and linking to those would have been a more than adequate response; summarising them as lucidly as you have done is kind. I'll certainly look a bit more at the outlines involved here and see if I can contribute.
 * By the way, is there a manual of style for outlines? I looked briefly but didn't find one. It would be good to know if there are (or to help to develop) standards about, for example, how much they should focus on simply giving a structured list of links to other articles vs giving commentary or other linking text between those. Mortee (talk) 17:50, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, the bare vs. fleshed out issue. Initially, I thought they should be bare, but you can't stop progress on a wiki. For example, the outline department used to be called the "Basic topics lists" department, starting with between 30 and 50 pages.  It was a collection of lists of the main topics on their respective subjects.  They included maybe the 50 or so main topics for each subject. They were to complement the already existing and more general "Lists of x topics".  Well, the basics topics WikiProject became well-supported, with lots of editing going on.  Editors came on there, and just kept adding more topics. The "List of basic geography topics", for instance, grew to be hundreds and hundreds of entries long (with all the country names, every conceivable land form type, etc.). Soon, the basic topics lists were far more comprehensive than the topics lists department's lists.  It was embarrassing. And if you culled them down, they just overgrew again. You couldn't prune those trees fast enough. Not just that, this happened to all the new pages too. It became an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation. So, we eventually changed the department name to "Outlines", and absorbed the general topics lists into it. Now there's over 720 of them.
 * The concept of evolution and growth also applies to outlines in their current form. Annotations are a standard feature of lists.  And so there are many editors who like to add annotations.  They rarely read the outline guideline before editing outlines.  And so annotations just kept popping up.  Well, I found that the annotations help in topic selection.  So, the outlines are like a restaurant menu, and the annotations describe each dish, to help the person browsing decide which link to click on next.  Without annotations, you have to click, wait for the page to load, then you see it's not what you were looking for, then you have to backtrack, find where you were on the page, and continue your browse. That's tedious. Annotations save time. So there are very strong arguments for having and not having annotations, but based on the basic topics growth fiasco, and that all lists are allowed to have annotations, removing them like pulling weeds is probably not feasible or desirable. They've been an established feature of outlines since the beginning of Wikipedia (outlines existed on WP long before the outline department -- they just weren't called "outlines"). Some of the very best outlines are annotated, and hundreds of outlines now include annotations. Removing them would definitely be a step backwards, and would unlikely achieve consensus. So, I'm working on a script, that may eventually become a gadget, for hiding/showing annotations at the push of a button.  To enjoy the benefits of both worlds (annotated and bare).
 * By the way, guidance, instructions, and tips are presented at Outlines. Enjoy. The Transhumanist 18:30, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you again! Mortee (talk) 23:47, 15 March 2017 (UTC)