The #PARENT and #CHILD discussion is making my system designer's skin crawl. I already said this once at http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000764.html, but indulge me as I me repeat it again:

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.

Now, allow me to elaborate.

Let's create a page in the new wiki called [[special:generic terms]]. Then we simply edit that page and add generic terms to the list -- a simple enumeration of [[free links]] like this:

[[World War II]] [[Baseball]] [[Afghanistan]] [[Colorado]]

etc.

This effectively defines the set of articles that are "parent" articles.

So all pages listed on this special page are handled specially by the wiki software. If you edit [[Baseball]], the software looks up all articles that have the generic term "baseball" in the title. (Encyclopedias are distinguished by their meaningful titles, so this shouldn't be a problem -- regardless of whether the page is [[History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]].) Back to the example. The software finds all articles whose titles include "baseball," and the [[Baseball]] article gets an automatic link to them. Job done. Similarly, the [[History of Baseball]] page gets an automatic link to [[Baseball]] ''because'' we put [[Baseball]] on the [[special:generic terms]] page. No one has to remember to add #PARENT and (aack) #CHILD links. It's all associated automatically by ''title'' with the simple addition to a list of generic terms--terms which have so far tempted people to create subpages.

This works nicely for [[Colorado Springs]] (by an accident of naming) but also for [[Denver, Colorado]]. Because both have "Colorado" in their title, they are flagged as "children" of [[Colorado]], and [[Colorado]] would automatically be updated to link to them when these new "child" page titles are defined.

Ah, but it breaks down when you want to write an article called [[Battle of Britain]] or [[D Day]], doesn't it? No World War II to be found in those titles. (Both are better encyclopedia titles than [[World War II/Battle of Britain]] and [[World War II/D Day]] IMHO.) So let's add another intuitive feature to the wiki software: a "see also" section. Let's say the convention is that in any article, all [[free links]] that appear between the words "see also:" on themselves on a line (the Perl regexp is /^see also:$/i) and a horizontal line will be indexed sort of like children as well.

So [[Battle of Britain]] would look this:

The '''Battle of Britain''' began on August [[1940]]. [sic]

After the [[France|French]] collapsed under the [[Blitzkrieg]]...

...

See also: [[World War II]] ----

Then any article mentioned in any other article's "see also" section would receive preferential treatment in the backlink feature that I mentioned in http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-November/000751.html.

The backlink on each article page could have a very intuitive name, like "Show all articles that mention this one." Then you get the list in two sections. If you clicked on it for [[World War II]], the first section would be intuitively titled, "All Articles that Refer to "World War II" In the See Also Section"), and the second section would be titled, "All Articles that Refer to "World War II" Anywhere in the Body of the Article").

These two techniques are both intuitive and relatively easy to implement in wiki software.

<>< [[tbc]]