Wikipedia subpages pros and cons

This page is the place to list facts and unbiased arguments about subpages at wikipedia.

Pro subpages

• Can be used to divide an otherwise long article into sections
• Can be used to facilitate linking to individual sections
• Can be used to store small amounts of data that could be useful but would clutter the main page
• Can be used to store large amounts of data that could be useful but would clutter the main page
• Can be used to create small sub-articles that would look pitiful on the top level but make sense within the main topic
• Known and used in the wikipedia community, removing subpages might cause confusion
• Can be used to create automatic links from the child to the parent and from a parent to the list of children; these links, appearing in a linkbar or other special place on a page, stand out and provide a useful, yet non-obtrusive, reminder to the reader of what "main" connections of the current page, in some useful sense of the word.
• Can be used to create standartised 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.
• Convey the most information most concisely: for instance [[Algeria/Government]] vs. [[Government of Algeria]] or [[Algerian government]]
• Can be used to separate out meta-pages from the contents of the encyclopedia proper

Contra subpages

• Arbitrary decisions on where to create subpages / No rules on where and when to create subpages
• Two hierarchy levels are not good, either only a top layer or unlimited levels
• Can be visually unpleasant
• 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.
• A subpage located by the search script or Google may be incomprehensible to the unsavvy user because they don't realize that the context is provided by the parent page, whose existence they are not aware of.
• Subpages imply a hierarchy that is often misleading or myopic: for instance, [[Algeria/History]] when [[History/Algeria]] would be as appropriate; or [[Film editing/Star wipe]] (when [[Digital effects/Star wipe]] refers to the same thing and would be as appropriate).
• Don't facilitate accidental linking, as one never says for instance "I think Paul McCartney is an accomplished Guitar/Bass player."

Other things to consider

• The switch to the PHP wiki might be the last chance to eliminate subpages
• If they are retained, a nice feature would be to autogenerate a list of links to subpages on each page that has them.

/Talk