[Wikipedia-l] No subpages. Is that your final answer?

Wed Nov 7 18:27:58 UTC 2001

Gareth Owen wrote:
> In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to this view.
> I believe that Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal
> places for those articles.

O.k., I'm more or less with you here, and this is part of what I keep
stumbling over when I think about this.  My first objection here is
that [[Nirvana/Band]] under the current system will have a link at the
top of the page to [[Nirvana]], which probably doesn't make that much
sense.

Indeed, [[Band/Television]], [[Band/Nirvana]], and [[Band/Catatonia]] make
more sense to me *from this point of view*: each of these pages will
have an automatic link to [[Band]], which would then presumably be a
broad overview of bands, or something of that sort.

Now, I'm _especially_ interested in this argument, which I think is
much more compelling than your band example:

>  Similarly its far easier remember how to link to
> [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to
> remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or
> [[Baseball History]]...

I think that's absolutely right.  Whether or not it is _compelling_,
I'm not sure.

One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I can tell) the *only*
thing special about subpages is that they auto-link back to the parent
page.  We would "technically" have done away with subpages if we
simply omitted that feature, and treated '/' as an ordinary character
like '_' or ':'.

So in part, this isn't a debate about "subpages", but about "naming
conventions", and in my mind, I keep mixing the two issues up.

> Similarly /Talk pages are great, and handy, if they're used for discussing the
> accompanying article rather than tedious meta-discussion best kept here,
> which, a few vociferous eejits aside, they are.

Yes!

I think we are all in agreement that /Talk is such an integral part of
our culture that we want to make them into a special case, a separate
talk: namespace, that is automatically there for every article.

> The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.

I agree.

I think people are suggesting that the subpages system leads people to
be "lazy" about coming up with page names.  But laziness isn't always
a bad thing, of course.  Lazy is good if it means more accidental
linking, or more easy-to-guess linking.  A consistent system of naming
pages is necessary for that.

There are some articles that are naturally sub-articles under a bigger
article.  [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] makes sense to me instantly, and I
also know instantly that it is different from [[Iwo Jima]].

[[World War II/Iwo Jima]] is the story of the battle of Iwo Jima in
World War II: what happened there?  Why was it important?

[[Iwo Jima]] is the more general story of the island, a CIA factbook
style article telling the history of the island, who lives there now,
what their economy is, what impact WWII had on these things, etc.

How would the anti-sub-pages crowd answer the argument that this is a
natural and intuitive naming scheme that should be preserved?  And
that alternatives such as [[Iwo Jima in World War II]] and [[The
Battle of Iwo Jima]] and [[Battle of Iwo Jima]] are going to be a lot
harder to 'accidentally' link to from elsewhere?

--Jimbo

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