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 however 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

Hierarchy problems

• Decisions on when or where to create subpages at all is 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.
• The particular choice of a subpage hierarchy is arbitrary: [[Algeria/History]] might be used when [[History/Algeria]] would be as just as appropriate; both [[Film editing/Star wipe]] and [[Digital effects/Star wipe]] refer to the same thing and would be equally appropriate. There's no clear principles on which to make the decision, and the decision does have consequences.
• Arbitrary subpage-imposed hierarchies arbitrarily contextualize information and thereby influence how articles are written: as one result of the foregoing, the small arbitrary hierarchy created by a parent page and its subpages quite often forces how we write content. Why should the people writing about star wipes be forced to consider them in the context of film editing as opposed to digital effects? If we write about the history of Algeria under Algeria/History, we'll consider Algeria's history as one element of Algeria's existence. If we write about the same subject under History/Algeria?, we'll consider Algeria's history as one element of history. There is no good reason to impose this sort of constraint upon Wikipedia's writers.
• 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.

Subpages replace the English meaning of the slash with a special meaning

• The slash has no clear meaning and is therefore confusing 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".
• Subpages are often written so as to require the contextualization of the main page, and new users often don't understand this: since the meaning of the slash in the context of this wiki is particularly unclear to new users, the meaning of a title of a subpage located by the search script or Google may be incomprehensible to the unsavvy user. In particular, they don't realize that the context is provided by the parent page, whose existence they are not aware of. They might not realize that the purpose or meaning of the subpage is given on the main page.

Other problems

• Subpages don't facilitate accidental linking: one never says for instance "I think Paul McCartney is an accomplished Guitar/Bass player." It is preferable, in the context of Wikipedia, to have page titles that can also be used in grammatical English sentences. Moreover, subpaging requires new users to learn arbitrary, idiosyncratic hierarchies, which could in many cases be avoided without subpages. To use the same example, bass guitar is easy to guess; guitar/bass? is not. Violin is easy to guess; [string instrument/violin]? is not.
• More to come, dammit. :-)

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 and commentary) will be available in the PHP wiki even without the subpage feature, using "name spaces".

/Talk