I think we should completely eliminate the use of subpages in this new software. I think we should rename pages presently named foo/bar? to foo--bar?. Frankly, I am sick and tired of subpages. I hate them. I feel more strongly than ever that the arguments I made in [1], [2], and [3]. I also don't really feel that those pages together make the best possible case against subpages; more can be said.
Subpages would be nice, I suppose, for other namespaces, like the Wikipedia namespace and the User namespace. I just hate the idea of continuing to use them for the article namespace.
What do you all think of this?
The idea of changing / to -- borders, in my opinion, on irrational. It's just a character, after all; if you want to grant it power of hierarchy creation, '--' can be invested with this power just as well as '/'.
I'm strongly in favour of subpages. In my opinion, virtually none of the arguments against them have strong merit. The most important argument against them (creating undesirable hierarchy, making B son of A when B may have independent interest or may just as well be considered the son of C) is actually the argument against improper subpaging. There're plenty of cases in which B has no independent interest - /Talk pages, long lists broken by first letters alphabetically, alternative treatments of the same topic or in-depth look at one aspect of the issue, too long to be put on the main page.
All the other arguments against subpages besides this one are much less relevant, in my opinion, than Larry thinks simply because subpages are also pages. Subpages are pages: they can be linked to just as well as regular pages. Example: in case [[Hebrew language//Phonology?]] needs to be linked to from a general page on phonology, it can be linked to there, and changing it to [Phonology of Hebrew]? isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference w.r.t. the link from the phonology page. Or, in general: B is a subpage of A; for instance, because B has no independent interest, but merely elaborates upon the aspect X of A. Now if there's a page devoted to the aspect X, it can link to A/B just as easily as it can link to "X of A". The link is not worse off because it points to a subpage. And generally, in all cases when the subpage should be treated as an separare entity, we can just ignore the slash aspect of it and treat its name as one large string. What I'm trying to explain here is that we let the hierarchical aspect matter in precisely the degree we want it to matter, and not more than that.
So what are subpages? They're just like regular pages, and in addition to that they also establish themselves as inherent parts of their "father" pages, too long or inconvenient to be included wholly inside the "father" page. That's the only difference between subpages and regular pages. And the only problem with this difference may arise when this relation is inappropriate, and there're certainly many cases when it is. Now on the other hand consider the benefits of this additional relation, this added information between pages.
One huge benefit is simply the fact that this relationships binds pages much more tightly than a mere link. Page A may link to 12 other pages, and we have no way of saying, simply and unequivocally, to the reader: hey, by far the most important among these 12 links is the link to B. The subpage mechanism lets us make this point simply and forcefully.
The other benefit of course is precisely our ability to link to subpages.
Could write more about this, but am feeling too damn tired now.
--AV
But what about the suggestion that we not use -- at all except as a substitute for / or : since the first creates a subpage (whose title wouldn't be allowed) and the second isn't allowed in links.
And again you have missed my point: don't use -- at all, except as a substitute in a title that would have required a / or : (and use it then only because the : is illegal and the / would be too since it would denote a subpage by a name that would not be allowed).
So far as your other comments go, you do have a point that the problem is incorrect subpaging; my question for you is how you would enforce only correct subpaging? It can't be done. --KQ
It's not simply a matter of having it be on the correct subpage. That would be a (very big) problem in itself; but the hierarchy itself is a problem too. Why [[Spain/History]]? Why not [[History/Spain]]? Why [[Film editing/Star wipe]]? Why not [[Post-production effects/Star wipe]]? I think you're assuming a greater knowledge than you or anyone has: a term can always be used in an unforeseen context, so why not avoid imposing any hierarchy on it that will eventually come to be seen as arbitrary?
One example of subpages that I rather like is Mercury and its various divisions. If I weren't so lazy and relatively new to Wikipedia, I would break up other multi-entry pages into subpages like this rather than listing all the entries in the same page. As for less clearly defined subpages like the Spain/History? and History/Spain? thing, why not have both and employ redirects? Assuming there's some sort of master History page where it would make sense to list various countries under separate subpages, of course. -BD
'/' is actually written into the Wikipedia software; [[/X]] creates a link to Wikipedia commentary/X, not just to /X. Whether we use "/" or "--" or anything else for subpages, I think it should be treated as a normal character. -- Simon J Kissane
I'm a strong supporter of subpages; see /Modular content creation, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack. --TheCunctator
Really, there's no limitation on the organization of content that is imposed by eliminating subpages.
I do like the idea of treating all /Talk pages differently, as well as perhaps a few other types of pages. The reason is that those pages are different, they are non-encylopedia articles.
Imagine this, for example: /Bibliography? can lead to a page that is editable in the "Wiki spirit" but which has structured fields for people to add references. In the present scheme, subpages are just pages. In a new scheme, subpages can be *special* as necessary. --Jimbo
I'm not opposed to parenthized titles -- indeed, I was only converted against subpages today. But it occurs to me that one principle of page naming is trying to guess how other authors might accidentally link the page. Of course, that in turn depends on where they expect a link to succeed. But surely [Ben Franklin's childhood]? is more natural than [Ben Franklin (Childhood)]?? Maybe not. I'm just thinking this through.
Ick! No, you're not. Perentheses are used to clarify context: "Benjamin Franklin's Childhood" is the right title. We need parentheses for things like "Turkey (Country)" and "Turkey (Bird)". Likewise "Mapping (Mathematics)" and "Deposition (Law)". Similarly, some means of specifying the link context of a page, so that for example, on other Law pages one can make a link to [[deposition]] and expect it to go to the right place, rather than to "Depostion (Chemistry)" or to an intermediate page. --LDC
[Ben Franklin/Childhood]? will automatically link to the Ben Franklin page. [Ben Franklin's Childhood]? would not - people might see this page and think our Ben Franklin page is bizarrely only about his childhood. The automatic linking is a powerful feature of subpages. - Tim
But it's still relatively easy to make that link back; the article will almost certainly start "[[Ben Franklin]] grew up in ...". The downside of the subpage is that it forces the automatic link; it doesn't give you any choice about it, whether it's appropriate or not, or where to put it. I think it is critical to make sure that it's easy to create good pages; it should also be more difficult to create bad ones. --LDC
The subpages were immensely useful in constructing September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack. As others have pointed out, they add two convenient functionalities:
That second functionality may not seem like much, but you try typing all that in over and over again.
LMS, you have not said how we benefit from the loss of the above functionality. And I hope you didn't mean to say things like "I have little time for people who do not respect me enough to consider my arguments, particularly when I find their own reasons to be pretty transparently wrong, and particularly when they are themselves rather new to Wikipedia and, as has happened before, simply don't understand the issues (though they think they do)" which is pretty awful, since you can get away with being rude since you're in charge, but noone else can. So I admire your policy of discouraging rudeness for everyone, including yourself: the King is not above the Law.
And you may be able to claim that AV doesn't respect you, that his reasons are transparently wrong, and that he's rather new, and simply doesn't understand the issues, but I hope you won't try claiming that about me. But you shouldn't have claimed that about anyone, because it's nonproductive, even if it's honestly felt. I don't think AV is trying to diss you. I know I'm not.
You're right that subpages are often a form of laziness; but they're not always. And you're forgetting that laziness is one of the three virtues of the programmer.
If what's really happening is that you're getting aggravated because the new system will have namespace-construction capabilities that encompass the nature of subpages but are better, then you should make that clearer. Because it's not obvious. Right now your statements have seemed a bit autocratic ("I regard their existence as a bug that must be stamped out." is a bit creepy, e.g.)
I'm not losing any sleep over it. But I want to be able to want to stay with Wikipedia. --TheCunctator
Actually, the current subpage system reminds me a lot of object-orientated languages like C++, which have a main object (like September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack) and variables and methods (like /Timeline?). My point is, object-orientated languages were developed because they have major advantages compares to the "flat" languages, like the original C. The idea is that contents that belongs together is grouped together. I know that is not directly compareable, but the idea is the same.
AFAIK, Larry's current view is "keep the / but remove the subpage functionality". But, then we'd have to limit the number of / s so there won't be things like pages/that/have/many/subpages. So, all chars are allowed, but (apart from : for namespaces) only / is restricted? Without having an actual effect? It comes to my mind that this is, to quote one of Larry's favourite words for subpages, arbitrary...
Actually, I am uncertain if I should support subpages (my script currently does), or if I should get rid of them. For the others, remember that with the new script there will (sooner or later) be a "delete" function for pages, maybe a "rename" function as well. So, Larry, you could move subpages where you don't like them, but keep them on, say, Poker, where you actually seem to support them.
Just a thought : How about a user option that disables subpages? You won't see all the subspace stuff if the option is "no subspaces", but others would. Sounds strange, doesn't it? --Magnus Manske
Your charge that I didn't consider your arguments and that I should reply to them on your essays' pages or write yet another essay on the subject is ridiculous both because I have already addressed them more than once and because this very page was created by you specifically for debating on subpages, which debating you then went on to ignore.
As for the 'rather new' canard, I've been playing with and watching Wikipedia for three months now (not as much as many here, of course, but not as little either), and have edited many articles with and without subpages from many diverse areas. If you made up your mind and aren't willing to entertain any arguments (which certainly seems to be the case) I suggest that you be honest about it.
I've had it for now with your condescension. So far you've shown that rational debate with you on the issue of subpages is impossible. Whatever your psychological problems are, I hope you solve them. --AV
A few subpage features are still useful, like the automatic links to the parent topics, the ability to rename all subpages by renaming the parent, and the ease of creating local links.
My main concern with getting rid of subpages is that different people will come up with different standards for sectioning large pages. For example, the country pages would be less usable if some pages were "Government of Algeria", others were "Cuba -- Government", or even "Canadian Government". Having a standard like "Canada/Government" makes it easier to agree on a single format. Another concern is that eliminating subpages may lead to larger pages, which may not be editable on many common browsers (Netscape browsers on Microsoft systems tend to have a 32K limit for editing pages).
I don't have strong feelings either way on this issue. Namespaces could replace the "Talk" pages quite nicely, and renaming/deletion may help enforce naming conventions. I'm sure Wikipedia will continue to surprise me in the future. --CliffordAdams
I totally agree, Magnus. I'll have a look at that and try to render it into a fair presentation of the dialectic. --LMS