Can those we've already created be grandfathered as subpages, or would we need to recreate them? Zoe Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:Folks,
when the whole subpage discussion first came up, Larry Sanger wrote: "Subpages would be nice, I suppose, for other namespaces, like the Wikipedia namespace and the User namespace." I have just added namespace-specific subpage support to Wikipedia. This means that we can now enable subpages selectively for only the User & Talk namespaces. I suggest doing so.
Currently users are already creating pages like:
[[User:Eloquence/Wikipedia Manifesto]] (not a real page).
With subpage support enabled, it would be possible to just type
[[/Wikipedia Manifesto]]
on the respective page, and the link would automatically go to the above page. Furthermore, the "Wikipedia Manifesto" page would provide an automatic backlink to [[User:Eloquence]].
Similarly; users are archiving talk pages like this:
[[Talk:Main Page/Archive 1]] [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 2]] [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 3]]
Again, here we can simply type
[[/Archive 1]] [[/Archive 2]] [[/Archive 3]]
and have automatic backlinks on the archive pages.
When the new Wikipedia software was developed, it was decided not to support subpages for the reason that they would disturb the Wikipedia article structure. I agree with this reasoning, but it is not valid for user and talk pages. Since we now have the ability to turn on subpages selectively, I see no reason not to do so. We could also globally enable them on wikis where they might be useful, e.g. Meta.
Regards,
Erik