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

Thu Nov 8 22:01:48 UTC 2001

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001 lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

> >[[Saturday_Night_Live/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead]]
> >...
> > In the second case, the main page serves to set the context of the
> > subpage in a really nice way.  Anyone stumbling into the subpage
> > would probably be interested in visiting the main page.
>
> Yes, that's the one use that subpages really make sense for: small
> topics that _only_ make sense in the context of a larger topic.
> But sacrificing that small utility to avoid more serious problems
> isn't that drastic, I think.  My personal preference would be to live
> with longer articles (just include those short things within the main
> article).  Accidental links aren't an issue here, precisely because
> these topics are context-dependent.

Agreed.  That's another thing that needed to be said.  :-)

> > You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I would respond
>
> No, parentheses are for context to disambiguate the main term,
> not for sub-domains.  Again, there's already a standard body of
> knowledge for how to do this: real encyclopedias.  I'm the first
> to point out that we aren't constrained by paper here, but there's
> no reason we can't learn from the existing scholarship about how
> to organize and title knowledge.  This has been going on for a
> long time, and they're very good at it.

Another thing I wish I had said.  :-)

> > what's the difference?  And shouldn't this page link to the main
> > [[Baseball]] page, automatically?  One would think so.
>
> "Automatic" things are great when they are things that a stupid
> computer can figure out.  Associations between ideas are at the
> bottom of that list.  Human beings should determine those.

This, by the way, is probably the most serious objection to any attempts
to automate the placement of navigational links in articles.  We should we
leave that to chance, if it's so important?

"Let the content itself determine the structure of the web."  That's my
motto.

> Sure, subpages are handy for some things (I use a lot of them).
> But they don't really do much that we can't do anyway, and they
> have at least one serious problem: that they enforce inappropriate
> conceptual relationships.  I think that's 10 times as important
> to get rid of than any mere convenience they might have.0

I agree with that 100%.  (I think there are a few other really serious
problems too, though.)

Larry