Talk:Outline of free software

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

The Transhumanist 01:47, 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 09:17, 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)

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


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

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)


 * 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)

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 00:06, 9 August 2015 (UTC)