Brief explanation of Wikipedia outlines Outlines on Wikipedia are a type of list article. Each outline is about the subject identified after "Outline of" in the title. "Outline" refers to the format of the article...
"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). In Wikipedia outlines, the hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets.
Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects (a structured list) showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure). They also serve as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. See Wikipedia:Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 17:12, 11 August 2016 (UTC)Reply | 
