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: -- ************************************************* * http://www.wikipedia.com/ * * You can edit this page right now! * *************************************************

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 10:53:12PM -0800, Simon Kissane wrote: 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]] -- Steven Barker scbarker(a)uiuc.edu True to our past we work with an inherited, observed, and accepted vision of personal futility, and of the beauty of the world. -- David Mamet Get my GnuPG public key at: http://www.blckknght.org/pubkey.asc Fingerprint: 272A 3EC8 52CE F22B F745 775E 5292 F743 EBD5 936B