Oy! Once more into the breach. :-)

Before I reply, let me say I am puzzled why we're still talking about this. Either you're asking for an explanation of my decision to eliminate subpages (which is fine!), or, perhaps, you are expressing disagreement that it should have been made so soon (that, too, would be fine). But no one has explicitly said the latter. In fact, it looks like the discussion is neither--it just looks like you're arguing about whether we should have subpages, and I don't quite see what the point of doing that, per se, is.

What do you think?

Anyway, to reply:

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:

Gareth Owen wrote: > In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to this view. > I believe that Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal > places for those articles.

O.k., I'm more or less with you here, and this is part of what I keep stumbling over when I think about this. My first objection here is that [[Nirvana/Band]] under the current system will have a link at the top of the page to [[Nirvana]], which probably doesn't make that much sense.

Indeed, [[Band/Television]], [[Band/Nirvana]], and [[Band/Catatonia]] make more sense to me *from this point of view*: each of these pages will have an automatic link to [[Band]], which would then presumably be a broad overview of bands, or something of that sort.

As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.

...

Similarly its far easier remember how to link to [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]]...

I think that's absolutely right. Whether or not it is _compelling_, I'm not sure.

Well, it might be easier for somebody to remember [[Baseball/History]] if he created or worked on that page, but if he had created [[history of baseball]], he'd no doubt find *that* easy to remember. 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. Other systems that do not use subpages might be just as easy. Then of course there's the problem that we won't know what pages use subpages and what ones don't; eliminating them altogether at least reduces the number of possibilities. So, on the whole, I think eliminating subpages will make it easier for us to remember page titles.

For me, the question doesn't turn on this issue, however.

One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I can tell) the *only* thing special about subpages is that they auto-link back to the parent page. We would "technically" have done away with subpages if we simply omitted that feature, and treated '/' as an ordinary character like '_' or ':'.

So in part, this isn't a debate about "subpages", but about "naming conventions", and in my mind, I keep mixing the two issues up.

On my view, it's about those things and a bit more. Having subpages actually can change ("force," "direct") the content of articles, and this can be a bad thing. See

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

for this and other arguments.

I think we are all in agreement that /Talk is such an integral part of our culture that we want to make them into a special case, a separate talk: namespace, that is automatically there for every article.

In other words, we can have the same functionality of /Talk pages without subpages.

...

The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.

I agree.

Well, I think there are a lot more failings than that. See the above URL.

I think people are suggesting that the subpages system leads people to be "lazy" about coming up with page names. But laziness isn't always a bad thing, of course. Lazy is good if it means more accidental linking, or more easy-to-guess linking. A consistent system of naming pages is necessary for that.

There are some articles that are naturally sub-articles under a bigger article. [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] makes sense to me instantly, and I also know instantly that it is different from [[Iwo Jima]].

[[World War II/Iwo Jima]] is the story of the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II: what happened there? Why was it important?

[[Iwo Jima]] is the more general story of the island, a CIA factbook style article telling the history of the island, who lives there now, what their economy is, what impact WWII had on these things, etc.

How would the anti-sub-pages crowd answer the argument that this is a natural and intuitive naming scheme that should be preserved? And that alternatives such as [[Iwo Jima in World War II]] and [[The Battle of Iwo Jima]] and [[Battle of Iwo Jima]] are going to be a lot harder to 'accidentally' link to from elsewhere?

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. E.g., if we get into the habit of naming battles without the definite article and using their most common names, then anyone who wants to try to guess at the name could correctly guess the name of the article is "Battle of Iwo Jima" (if that's the common name--I don't know if it is :-) ).

There are *other* significant disadvantages to subpages, which I won't rehearse here--you can find them on

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

--Larry

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.

...

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons

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

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Tim Chambers wrote:

I would like to see wiki software that allows for enumeration of generic terms that would trigger navigation links to appear on article pages automatically. It's a natural consequence of [[Wikipedia is not paper|Wikipedia not being paper]]. Using the baseball articles as examples, "baseball" should be tagged as one of those generic terms. Then any page with "baseball" in the title would get a link to the [[Baseball]] article, and the [[Baseball]] article would list links to all the other baseball articles.

Tim makes some excellent new points here. The above suggestion is interesting; we should keep it in the backs of our minds...

Larry