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

Wed Nov 7 18:29:21 UTC 2001

--- Gareth Owen <wiki at gwowen.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to
> this view.

And now I'd like to take a stab at countering complaints.

> Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band...

Television (band), Nirvana (band) and Catatonia (band) are all
better page titles. I seem to remember reading that UseModWiki
was going to allow parentheses in titles at some point. Now I
hope the PHP software supports this.

> [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]]...)

[[History of Baseball]] and [[Baseball World Series]] are
synonymous.

> Similarly /Talk pages are great...

But the separate talk: namespace is even better.

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

I think the concept of subpages is flawed in an encyclopedia. Why
limit ourselves to a primitive hierarchical structure?
Eliminating subpages paves the way for the implementation of even
better navigation features.

I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration of
generic terms that would trigger navigation links to appear on
article pages automatically. It's a natural consequence of
[[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being paper]]. Using the
baseball articles as examples, "baseball" should be tagged as one
of those generic terms. Then any page with "baseball" in the
title would get a link to the [[Baseball]] article, and the
[[Baseball]] article would list links to all the other baseball
articles.

Going even farther, maybe "See also:" should be handled
specially. I can't think of how it would work, though.

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