First, I agree that something like this might be a way to make the elimination of subpages a lot more palatable. I think there might indeed be some technical way to replace messy, inelegant, and generally bad subpages as well as sometimes messy, inelegant "title (context)" named pages with either something like Lee's proposal or something like Simon's. Lee's makes more sense to me, for just the reasons Lee cites. But I think there might be other possibilities we should consider. Whatever we do, we should bear in mind that Wikipedia should be reasonably simple for users. Right now it *is* reasonably simple, which is one reason so many people are able to work on it. (On the other hand, probably the slight learning curve is one reason the quality of Wikipedia is as good as it is.) Nupedia's experience teaches, if anything else, that it's a really *bad* idea to ask even smart people to learn complicated systems. I like Lee's idea, but rather than having the text "#CONTEXT" in the article itself--there are many ways of messing that up--I would rather see a drop-down menu containing a list of different subject areas. This would allow us to link to the analysis article in math rather than to the analysis article in philosophy with no extra typing. The page title (the one at the top of the screen) generated could be, if we wanted it to be, "analysis (mathematics)". This might provide a good idea for a convention on how to link from one context to another context. That is, if I wanted for some reason to link from the philosophy article about analysis to the math article, then I could decontextualize the link by typing [[analysis (mathematics)]]. Another excellent feature of having a drop-down menu listing different subject areas is that it would allow us each individually to follow articles only in areas we're interested in. If I don't care about what's going on in math, and I'm only interested in philosophy and psychology (say), then I could set my "recent changes" page so that I am presented only with recent changes to philosophy and psychology articles. Of course, it could be a multiple-selection menu, so that the article about God could be listed under both philosophy and religion. This would cohere (or could be made to cohere) perfectly with Nupedia's top-level category scheme, which would no doubt be a significant advantage in the long run. OK, all this being said, what worries me most about this kind of proposal is that it complicates the system hugely. I'd have to be convinced that the amount of complication it would represent wouldn't be so enormous that we would have dug ourselves into a hole we couldn't get out of. This is *easy* to underestimate--you programmers ought to know that. The above discussion, as well as Lee's, I'm sure we'd both agree, are completely inadequate explorations of the various considerations that would be involved. What we need is a sort of technical and nontechnical report that would clearly lay out all of the potential issues--technical problems, administrative problems, political problems, epistemological problems ;-), etc., that this proposal would raise. Barring some such discussion, I don't know how we could adequately evaluate the risk. Larry On Thu, 8 Nov 2001 lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote: