Mike Friedman wrote:
again". Neither wiki nor hypertext in general is hierarchical, but networked, with many small pieces of information each reachable by a
True, but I don't see any reason why it can't be both. I think this feature would be most useful for maintaining large complexes of related articles (such as the ones I've been working on relating to New York City.)
One objection would be that the history of New York City is both a subcategory of New York City and of American history. This looks more like a network (web, mesh) than a hierarchy:
United States --> History of the United States | | | | V V New York City --> History of New York City
There used to be "subpages" in Wikipedia's first year, because the originally used UseModWiki software supported this. However, this was abandoned. Articles such as [[Sweden/History]] were then renamed [[History of Sweden]]. Some argumentation is found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subpages
"Real" (classic, printed) encyclopediae have also wrestled with this problem. In some, "language" and "art" are mere subheadings in the article on Poland, in others, "Polish language" and "Polish art" are articles of their own.
I think the least intrusive way to implement a part of your idea is to introduce a "hide this subsection" link (a triangle icon) next to today's subheadings, just like you can hide the table of contents at the top of the article. For editing, storage and URLs, the article would still be one whole. But for viewing, subsections could be folded in and out.