Talk:Glossary of philosophical isms

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[edit] Re: Transwiki

This article has been copied to Wiktionary and converted to a dictionary-linkified version. See Wiktionary:Transwiki:Glossary of philosophical isms.

Note that while the glossary entries on Wiktionary are linked to Wiktionary definition articles, the glossary entries in Wikipedia glossaries are linked to Wikipedia articles, which afford greater coverage of each topic. That is one of the main purposes of glossaries on Wikipedia: they are a specialized form of list. Lists are used as both identification and navigation aids, while annotations on such lists assist readers in selecting articles which they would like to investigate further. So this article, a glossary, serves multiple purposes:

1. it is a list of philosophical isms, which constitute a large proportion of the schools, doctrines, and theories of philosophy. Studying this list will help students of philosophy become more familiar with the subject of philosophy as a whole as well as its terminology.
2. as a table of contents, this specialized list serves to identify Wikipedia's coverage of philosophical isms, gathering them into one place, to provide a selection from which to choose from, as well as to make it easier to find a particular ism a reader is looking for even when he or she can't quite remember the precise term. Glossaries like this one help combat memory difficulties such as the commonly experienced tip of the tongue phenomenon.
3. this article used to be a plain list, with just the terms themselves, which served as links to the articles. When using the list I found that it was very time consuming to follow each link to see if the topic was the one I was looking for. Therefore, I copied and refined definitions from each article to this list, to help speed up this process. Reading down the list is much much faster than following each link, which can entail a several second delay (even longer for modems), which is often longer than what it takes to read a definition. Having brief summaries all in one place saves the reader a lot of time, whether he wants to study the whole list or is looking for a specific ism (for which he remembers the definition but not the term).

For these reasons, this article should be retained as a Wikipedia glossary. Please help expand this useful article. Thank you.  The Transhumanist   07:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)