Wikipedia subpages pros and cons

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

Pro subpages

• Helps link together related data: subpages can be used to divide an otherwise long article into sections; so can ordinary pages, but with subpages, the sections are connected automatically by being subpages.
• Similarly to the foregoing, subpages can be used to facilitate linking to individual sections and between sections.
• Similarly to the foregoing, subpages 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.
• Provides a useful home for data that wouldn't make sense on its own: subpages can be used to store small or large amounts of data about a subject that could be useful but would clutter the main page about that subject.
• Similarly to the foregoing, subpages can be used to create small sub-articles that are puzzling as stand-alone encyclopedia articles, but which make sense qua encyclopedia articles as subpages of a main article
• Established habit: they're known and used in the wikipedia community, removing subpages might cause confusion among those who have used them and who have not practiced writing pages without them
• Makes for concise titles: subpages convey the most information most concisely: for instance [[Algeria/Government]] vs. [[Government of Algeria]] or [[Algerian government]]
• What do we replace /Talk subpages with?

Contra subpages

• Decisions on when to create subpages are necessarily arbitrary: every encyclopedia topic can be regarded as a subtopic of another encyclopedia topic. There is no good reason for us to regard some topics as subtopics of other topics when all encyclopedia topics can be so regarded.
• Single-level hierarchy is unjustified: two hierarchy levels are not good, either only a top layer or unlimited levels would seem to make any sense.
• The slash has no clear meaning and is therefore disconcerting in an article title: The slash creates a completely ambiguous relationship between the subject to the left of the slash and the subject to the right of the slash. Other punctuation has clear meaning. Wiki's slash does not. Therefore, it is better, for clarity, to eliminate the slash and replace it with something with clearer meaning.
• 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)
• 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.

Removed pro subpages points:

• 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

/Talk