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. An unnamed online encyclopedia uses subpages for this purpose.
• 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]]
• Can be used to create standardised organisation 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.

It seems that all three schemes are equally arbitrary and one could standardize on either one.

• Can be used to separate out meta-pages from the contents of the encyclopedia proper

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 English.
• The slash has an ordinary meaning that subpages co-opt: giving the slash a special meaning within wiki co-opts its occasional ordinary use within English. Accordingly it sometimes creates "parent" pages that shouldn't exist, such as "8 1" in the title "8 1/2" or "GNU" in "GNU/Linux?" or "Face" in the movie title "Face/Off?".
• 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.
• Some of the current uses of subpages (/Talk) will be available in the PHP wiki even without the subpage feature, using "name spaces".

/Talk