[[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.
Yes, that's the one use that subpages really make sense for: small topics that _only_ make sense in the context of a larger topic. But sacrificing that small utility to avoid more serious problems isn't that drastic, I think. My personal preference would be to live with longer articles (just include those short things within the main article). Accidental links aren't an issue here, precisely because these topics are context-dependent.
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]]?
Because "Nirvana/Rock band" forcibly encodes an association between the rock band and the concept "Nirvana" that's not appropriate. If there were some relationship, we could still link back to it; if there is no relationship at all, we remove the author's choice.
I think it makes them easy to *guess*, though. 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.
But Larry's right here--allowing subpages just makes three things you have to guess among rather than two. Personally, "History of Baseball" is the first thing I'd assume, because that's what it would be in a paper encyclopedia.
You might suggest: [[Baseball (History)]], but then I would respond
No, parentheses are for context to disambiguate the main term, not for sub-domains. Again, there's already a standard body of knowledge for how to do this: real encyclopedias. I'm the first to point out that we aren't constrained by paper here, but there's no reason we can't learn from the existing scholarship about how to organize and title knowledge. This has been going on for a long time, and they're very good at it.
what's the difference? And shouldn't this page link to the main [[Baseball]] page, automatically? One would think so.
"Automatic" things are great when they are things that a stupid computer can figure out. Associations between ideas are at the bottom of that list. Human beings should determine those.
Won't any convention "force" or "direct" us to think in certain ways? I hardly see this as an objection against this _particular_ convention.
Conventions are chosen freely; yes, they force you to think certain ways, because we have chosen them to do just that. We need more conventions. But we can also break them if we choose. Hard-coding things in software is harder to rebel against.
Sure, subpages are handy for some things (I use a lot of them). But they don't really do much that we can't do anyway, and they have at least one serious problem: that they enforce inappropriate conceptual relationships. I think that's 10 times as important to get rid of than any mere convenience they might have.0