Wikipedia subpages pros and cons/Talk

Can we restrict subpage discussion to this location from now on? I think there are 10 different pages on this topic floating around. - MB

I agree. Though I think the other pages should be refactored, and any real arguements they contain should be moved here. Perhaps I'll have time to start on that tomorow. --MRC

• Having a "magical" character in the title is unpleasant, creates "parent" pages that shouldn't exist, and therefore prevents some article titles from being what they should: for instance [[8 1/2]], [[Gnu/Linux]], etc. (Who has said this? This doesn't make any sense to me. --LMS)
  • I (KQ) said that--well actually, just the part after "unpleasant,"--What I mean is that 8 1/2 is a movie by [Federico Fellini]?, but if I link to it like that it thinks I'm on a subpage of [[8 1]], and that the subpage is called [[2]]. The same things happen with [[Face/Off]] and at least 2 other entries I created, though I'd be hard pressed to tell you which they were (I've been around for the last 7 months). --KQ
  • For the record, it was the part before "unpleasant" that was the part I thought didn't make any sense. :-) --LMS
    • It was I who wrote that, in an attempt to be fair to the issue, even though I'm pro subpages. The unpleasantness is aesthetic: no other character plays a special role in the title except slash. It's potentially unclear to newbies, and it's a "magical", ad-hoc solution (why slash? why not the semicolon for instance?) that offends my aesthetic sensibility (I do think, however, that advantages of subpages greatly outweigh the drawbacks) --AV
      • If I understand your reaction correctly, I'd say its unpleasantness is almost wholly due to the fact that, in the context of a wiki, the slash has no clear meaning. It's an aesthetic problem rooted in semantics. :-) --LMS
  • Oh. Well, then I can't help you. <g> "Unpleasant" is too imprecise for me to know exactly what the author meant--I think it was along the same lines as what I added, but I'm not sure. --KQ

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• Can be used to create standardised mini-schemes facilitating organised treatment of the same kind of relationship; for a trivial but by no means exhaustive example, consider "X/Childhood" in a biographical article versus competing schemes "Childhood of X" and "X's Childhood" creating confusion and unnecessary complication.
  • I've removed this from the list because it just doesn't make any clear sense. Put differently, I could just as easily have made it a "contra subpages" point. There are going to be competing schemes with or without subpages. E.g., we can just as easily imagine "X/Childhood" as "X/Upbringing" and "X/Childhood and Youth," etc. Besides, we shouldn't make this decision based on what can be easily standardized: we aren't standardizing yet and nothing about the software or our habits militates against some future standardization. --LMS
• Can be used to separate out meta-pages from the contents of the encyclopedia proper
  • This, again, is not an advantage specific to subpages. In Magnus's PHP wiki software, theoretically, we could get rid of subpages entirely while still, as we are planning to, using a "Wikipedia:" namespace for Wikipedia-related articles. --LMS
    • This is the counter-point to the subpages create-a-hierarchy argument. Strictly speaking, one could create a hierarchy of page names with or without subpages, they just make it a little more intuitive to do so. Sometimes this is bad (Electromagnetism/Charge?), sometimes this is good (Electromagnetism/Talk). That's all.
      • The argument isn't just that they can be used to create a hierarchy, which of course a no-subpages system could be used to create. The argument is that the hierarchy is hard-wired and difficult to change. That is what I wrote at [1] (which of course I don't expect you to have read, but I've made the point there anyway). --LMS