User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox43

Outline development

You are doing an awesome job on outlines, especially city outlines. Keep up the excellent work.

I've been working on a way to produce quality city outlines faster, that I thought you might be interested in. It takes a lot of the repetitive typing out the process. I've noticed you've been converting the previous city outline you've developed into the next city, which means deleting the old city name and typing the new city name over and over in the headings and standard entries.

There's a template, called Template:Outline city.

By inserting that template via a process called substitution, its content can be put into an outline where it can then be edited. It has a parameter, "{{{1}}}", which represents the city name that gets included in the substitution, like this:

You put the above line on a blank page, with whatever city you want in place of "Moscow", and a skeleton of a city outline is produced when you save the page, with the city name appearing wherever {{{1}}} was.

At that point, the outline is ready for editing with new topics and sections. Also, the editor needs to remove any "standard" entries or sections that do not apply to that particular city, like if it has no canals.

I went over the existing city outlines and upgraded the Template:Outline city with headings and topics from them, for ease of outline creation. The template has been greatly expanded to include likely topics pertaining to any given city.

It's best to create each new outline on its own draft page, like User:Cote d'Azur/Outline of Moscow, so that there is a record of edits made to the article. That way, others can see how the outline was developed, and learn from it. Also, if someone else helps develop the article, their contributions will be recorded and attributed accordingly in the outline's history. When the outline is ready for article space, the whole page is moved rather cut/pasted, preserving the edit history.

Once all the topics you can find are added to the page, then you use the RedlinksRemover on it, and they are either stripped out or delinked, depending on where they are located in the outline. Red end nodes without annotations are removed, but those with children are just delinked to remain as part of the tree structure.

I hope you decide to try this method of outline creation, for two reasons: first, I believe it will make the process easier and therefore more fun. Second, it would be nice to get someone else's (your) opinion on how the method can be improved.

See ya on the outline pages.

Ciao,