I don't agree. We aren't talking about the wisdom of subpages, we are talking about the typing shortcut and the linkbacks. Both are not very useful. If you wanted to add a warning to regular pages, saying "Uh, it is best not to use the slash character '/' in article titles" with a link to a discussion of subpages, while not having the warning in special pages, that'd be fine with me. It would be fine with me if we put that message everywhere, saying that we discourage the use of subpages generally. But we really should discourage them generally by not "supporting" them with useless cute features. --Jimbo

Erik Moeller wrote: Maybe I'm missing something, but how would this procedure handle the situation where other users also would have identically named sub-pages. It is certainly reasonable to expect that many of our busier users would have sub-pages named "/archive 1", "/archive 2", "/archive 3", etc. Eclecticology

We have hundreds of archive links and user subpages, often on pages with long names. The benefit of shortcuts and linkbacks is far from negligible as we approach a million pages. The reality is that people are creating them, including yourself: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales/Why_I_oppose_a_cabal http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales/Statement_of_principles Either you ban subpages entirely, or you support them properly depending on context. But choosing not to support them to "discourage" their use is schizophrenic. Regardless, I primarily added the support for my own use. If you intend to block this feature on Wikipedia by imperial decree, I don't care much. Regards, Erik

Can those we've already created be grandfathered as subpages, or would we need to recreate them? Zoe Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)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 -- +++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more http://www.gmx.net +++ NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f�r 1 ct/ Min. surfen! _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now