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@nupedia.com wrote:
I earlier proposed something similar to the "#PARENT" idea, but I'd like to warn against it as used here: just using to creat the link is bad. We can already create links to parent articles, and we _should_ do so with plain English sentences that establish context. Remember the "establish context" rule? The article "Generalisimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead" shouldn't just have a hidden tag that puts a link to SNL in the title bar rather than the article; it should begin with a clear English sentence, "Late-night variety show [[Saturday Night Live]] contained a news parody..." Sentences. Good.
My idea was "#CONTEXT", which was used to do the other thing that subpages are useful for, and for which I currently use them, and that's to simplify cross-linking among pages within a subject area. See the Poker pages, for example; but the same thing could be done with "Law", "Medicine", "Mathematics", etc. My idea was that if a page contained a "#CONTEXT Law" tag, then any link in that page like [[bar]] would, when the page was saved, search first for a page "Bar (Law)", and only then "Bar". Likewise, under "#CONTEXT Chemistry", [[deposition]] would look for "Deposition (Chemistry)" and then "Deposition" (hopefully a disambiguating page), but never "Depostion (Law)".
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