Some have said that the advantage of having subpages is that every subpage has a link to its parent page. We could still keep that functionality, with a little extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.
Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and [[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently, [[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to [[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename [[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]], the link back disappears.
That is why I propose a "#PARENT" command. The "#PARENT" command would be placed at the beginning of [[History of Afghanistan]], as follows: #PARENT [[Afghanistan]] Then, a link to [[Afghanistan]] will appear on the [[History of Afghanistan]] page, just like a link to [[Afghanistan]] appears on the [[Afghanistan/History]] page.
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Barring major objections, I think this is *exactly right*. I think this might be a way to achieve the consensus I was talking about. It gives the "automatic linkback" capability that we like about subpages, but (respecting what LDC said yesterday, which made sense to me), it makes it more flexible and allows humans to determine the conceptual relationships.
All the #PARENT command would *really* need to do would be to make the automatic linkback. There could be multiple parents. The parents don't need to know about their children, unless we do it.
I like it.
Simon Kissane wrote:
Some have said that the advantage of having subpages is that every subpage has a link to its parent page. We could still keep that functionality, with a little extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.
Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and [[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently, [[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to [[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename [[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]], the link back disappears.
That is why I propose a "#PARENT" command. The "#PARENT" command would be placed at the beginning of [[History of Afghanistan]], as follows: #PARENT [[Afghanistan]] Then, a link to [[Afghanistan]] will appear on the [[History of Afghanistan]] page, just like a link to [[Afghanistan]] appears on the [[Afghanistan/History]] page.
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On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Barring major objections, I think this is *exactly right*. I think this might be a way to achieve the consensus I was talking about. It gives the "automatic linkback" capability that we like about subpages, but (respecting what LDC said yesterday, which made sense to me), it makes it more flexible and allows humans to determine the conceptual relationships.
But that's what hyperlinks generally do.
All the #PARENT command would *really* need to do would be to make the automatic linkback. There could be multiple parents. The parents don't need to know about their children, unless we do it.
If that's all the parent command were supposed to do, then why not forego the heavy lifting and just go with the hyperlinks we've already got?
Suppose we have pages [[Afghanistan]] and [[Afghanistan/History]]. Currently, [[Afghanistan/History]] has a link back to [[Afghanistan]] in it. But if we rename [[Afghanistan/History]] to [[History of Afghanistan]], the link back disappears.
I can't imagine that there wouldn't be a link to [[Afghanistan]] in an article about Afghanistan's history. :-)
Larry
Simon Kissane wrote:
#PARENT [[Afghanistan]]
This would make wikipedia editing seem more like a programming language and less like plain English. And the original question comes back: Is "Afghanistan" the only and natural parent/context for "History of Afghanistan"? Isn't "History" or at least "History of Central Asia" just as natural a parent? Can an article have more than one #PARENT? (That would be like multiple inheritance in C++ ...)
It is indeed very easy to start the article like this:
The [[history]] of [[Afghanistan]] cannot be fully understood without the context of the [[history of Central Asia]]. Within this region of [[Central Asia]], Afghanistan plays a special role because of its high [[mountain]]s, bordering on the [[Himalayas]].
This is plain English, it doesn't require any software modifications, it allows any number "parents" or other complex relationships between articles. However, it is the beginning of a *well-written* article, which is really difficult to enforce through policies or software.
On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 10:53:12PM -0800, Simon Kissane wrote:
Some have said that the advantage of having subpages is that every subpage has a link to its parent page. We could still keep that functionality, with a little extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.
Subpages have two useful characteristics: 1) the subpages link back to the parent (so [[Baseball/History]] automatically links back to [[Baseball]]). 2) If you know the parent page, you can easily guess where a subtopic is without guessing how it is named (cf [[World War II/Normandy]])
The suggestion of a #PARENT command is good at providing the first part, but does nothing for the second.
I propose that instead of #PARENT we make it so that a command "#CHILD foo bar" on [[foo]] aliases [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] (which should have an independantly meaningful name). [[baz]] would get an automatic backlink to [[foo]] and to any other pages that name it as a child (and perhaps include what it is refered to on those pages?). The Wikipedia software could then resolve all links to [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] automatically.
This would let locations like [[World_War_II/Normandy]] move to some other name without loosing it's obviousness, and [[History of Baseball]] be both [[Baseball/History]] and [[History/Baseball]].
Perhaps we could allow multiple levels of redirection so that I could link to [[World War II/Midway/Order of battle]] without having any idea what the real name of that page might be. This might cause problems if intermediate subpages do not exist, but that could be worked out (after all, Unix filesystems can do all of this).
Of course automating this shouldn't be an excuse to not introduce subtopics inline in the article, but they would allow more simple expression of ideas that *do* fit into a hierarchical structure.
Steve aka [[BlckKnght]]
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