Angela wrote:

On 3/23/06, Birger bweynants@gmail.com wrote:

...

Why is the option to make subpages in the main namespaces not enabled by default? Is there something wrong with making subpages into the main namespace?

There's some old discussion which might help to explain it on Meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Case_against_subpages http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Get_rid_of_subpages_entirely

Angela.

this discussion don't seems (to me) very factual. much "I don't like", with little reasons.

I use extensively sub pages as soon as an article begin to be too big to be reasonable to have in one page or to write courses or big howtos.

I don't give any category to sub-pages, only to the main one, like that one. http://fr.opensuse.org/G%C3%A9rer_ses_photographies

jdd

On 3/22/06, Joshua Yeidel yeidel@wsu.edu wrote:

I think the best argument against subpages in Wikipedia is that it removes a whole set of arguments from the table (is "Biochemistry" a subpage of "Biology" or of "Chemistry"? Who decides? Should I add a page as its own main page or as a subpage of something else?). There's less useless controversy letting the links within pages (including "what links here") specify the information relationships.

In non-encyclopedia contexts, you may have information architectures that are best expressed using main-space subpages. If so, it isn't hard to set up.

Yes, looking at those old pages (the seem to predate mediawiki in fact, one talks about the coming NEW php implementaiton of wikipedia), as an "archaelogist" rather than a participant, it seems to me that the crux was the tension between seeing things as a hierarchy as opposed to a more general structure.

Hierarchies are appealing on the surface because they seem to correspond to the natural world, unfortunately too often they correspond to particular points of view of the world and fall apart when you try to use them to reconcile the views of multiple people*. Having been a long term (and now retired) participant in the object-oriented language wars, I understand too well how this clash of hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical views can cause conflict.

WIth Brion's recent comments I'm sensing that subpages were originally intended to be used for the implementation of talk pages (and possibly similar things). But then the early wikipedians started using them for other uses like disambiguation and categorization, and the strains in the design started to show (again, since I wasn't "there" at the time this might be an imagined history).

They seem to have been kept because they are useful for things like factoring long-winded talk pages, and for things like packaging template "subroutines." As Joshua points out, for a site using mediawiki with a controlled context and/or user set, they might be useful in more general usage, but I'd beware of what drove them into the corner for wikipedia.

* For some interesting reading on how hierarchies within the "common wisdom" don't work out in practice, I'd recommend you track down a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's essay "What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?" If you are REALLY fascinated you might want to trudge through George Lakov's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" which gives lots of examples of how different cultures have very different classifications of real world objects from the point of view of a cognitive linguist.

-- Rick DeNatale

Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/

Brion Vibber wrote:

Since the "/" character is legitimately used in many titles,

this is simply a matter of syntax and is up to the devl people (thanks to them, MediaWiki is a nive piece of code :-)

Instead we have a system of

associated namespaces (primarily the Talk: namespace) which provide a machine-readable separation with much much lower probability of ambiguity.

I don't really see the relation between sub pages and namespace. Namespace are very difficult to manage (admin task). sub pages on my own work are very common

jdd

Brion Vibber wrote:

jdd wrote:

...

I don't really see the relation between sub pages and namespace.

Obviously you weren't around when talk pages were subpages.

of course not :-)

I use sub-pages fort courses or howto's too big for one page and too small to be considered as a book.

jdd