On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Here's a couple of good examples of good uses of
subpages:
[[Villanelle/Example]]
and
[[Saturday_Night_Live/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead]]
In the second case, the main page serves to set the context of the subpage
in a really nice way. Anyone stumbling into the subpage would
probably be interested in visiting the main page.
They're as good as far as they go. But there are some significant
disadvantages. Pointing to examples of "good" subpages is not very
persuasive to me. I mean, sure--there are plenty of examples where they
seem to work, where they seem to have some use. Nobody who says we should
get rid of subpages denies this. The point is that, on the whole, they do
more damage than good.
As soon as we
move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be
[[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.
But how, exactly, is this really different from, let's say
[[Nirvana/Rock band]]?
Well, it's different in several ways. For one thing, whereas the meaning
of [[Nirvana (rock band)]] is plain to anyone who has ever used an
encyclopedia before, the meaning of [[Nirvana/Rock band]] is not. Anyone
who doesn't know that Nirvana is the name of a rock band is going to be
particularly confused by the name [[Nirvana/Rock band]]. Is Nirvana a
drug used by rock bands? Is it a bit of slang when talking about rock
concert experiences? Is there a rock band devoted to the concept or
attainment of nirvana? Or, perhaps, is there a rock band called
"Nirvana"?
Moreover, subpages in this case are used in a totally different way from
in other cases. "Rock band" is not a subtopic of "Nirvana," in the
way
that "Iwo Jima" is a subtopic of "World War II." (We aren't
writing about
the *rock band variety* of nirvana. :-) )
Suppose some people have taken to making albums subpages of bands. Then
we couldn't do that for Nirvana's albums in this case, unless we wanted to
munge subsubpages.
Why should the page about Nirvana live on a subpage (a subpage of a page
about a religious concept!!) whereas The Beatles get their own page. (Or
maybe they should be on a subpage of [[insect]]?)
Etc. See "Contra subpages" again.
The fact is
that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier
to remember. It is just a system, which implies one indeed
reasonably easy way to remember page titles.
I think it makes them easy to *guess*, though.
But so do other conventions! The only reason they're easy to guess is
that they represent a convention--it has nothing to do with the fact that
they're subpages.
Besides, the point is just empirically false. Since we don't know a
priori when someone has or hasn't created a subpage, we can't guess. We
have to use the search engine (which is one reason it's important for that
search engine to be fast). Really, there's no way to get around using
that search engine to check up on the names of possibly already-existent
articles.
And that's pretty important.
[[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]]? Hard to guess which
it might be. But [[Baseball/History]] -- at least it is a system.
We could say: use "X history" rather than "history of X," and set up
a
competing system. Right now, in fact, we use all three--the two I just
mentioned, and "X/History."
You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I
would respond --
what's the difference? And shouldn't this page link to the main
[[Baseball]] page, automatically? One would think so.
Naw, I wouldn't suggest that.
Any page about the history of baseball should and almost certainly would
have a link to the [[baseball]] article within the first two lines of the
article.
Well, I think
there are a lot more failings than that. See the above URL.
I would answer that it's one naming scheme,
but it has no great advantages
over the combination of [[Iwo Jima]] and one of the names just mentioned
(e.g., [[Battle of Iwo Jima]]). It's no harder to "accidentally" link to
from elsewhere. Making battles subpages of wars is more or less a matter
of convention, and other intuitive conventions can be learned if they
indeed make some intuitive sense.
Won't any convention "force" or "direct" us to think in certain
ways?
I hardly see this as an objection against this _particular_ convention.
No, that's not the forcing and directing objection. Here's that
objection, again, from "Contra subpages":
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, particularly when it is arbitrary. It
simplifies the situation greatly to let each topic determine its own
context, as it were.
Well, I disagree with some of those.
OK!
For example: "Subpages replace the English
meaning of the slash with a
special meaning" -- the "sub" meaning of "slash" is well known
in
English, at least to people who use computers at all, which means all
Wikipedians and all customers. Websites do it!
http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Art_History/Criticism_and_Theory/
Well, it's not used consistently in Wikipedia, and that's why it's
unclear--it's ambiguous.
Another quote:
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. For example, we could make "A" a subpage of "Countries of the
world"; then, the list of pages under "A" would be the set of the
countries of the world whose names in English begin with the letter "A."
We could also make "Pearl Harbor" a subtopic of "World War II," and
the
relationship here is that Pearl Harbor is
the-location-of-an-important-attack-in World War II. We could make "David
Hume" a subtopic of "Philosopher" because Hume is a philosopher. Etc.
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.
People know what this means, instantly. This means
that this category
"Criticism and Theory" is not about criticism and theory generally,
but in the context of Art History.
Yes. If it were always used that way, then maybe it would be OK (the
other objections to subpages notwithstanding. But indeed, if you'll
notice, /Arts/Art_History/Criticism_and_Theory/ is already a
subsubcategory, and if we're making *that* a subsubcategory, then golly,
why aren't we making subsubsubcategories for the criticism and theory of
the history of, say, pre-Rafaelite painting? The slash has meaning and
makes sense in a Yahoo-type hierarchy, I'll concede. As stand-alone
two-story hierarchy, it seems to have come to mean quite a wide variety of
things.
Larry