[WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technological obscurantism

[Simetrical]

On 10/13/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the article namespace this apparently runs into the problem that
> we've disabled subpages for articles.
>
> I suspect this is easy to undo, and possibly even wise to undo (did
> we just move all /Draft pages to the talk namespace?). Dev?

Subpages were disabled because 1) they weren't viewed as remarkably
useful and 2) it made it impossible to have an article whose name
contained a slash without some rather confusing behavior occurring.
The latter reason is a bit degenerate anyway, mind, because the
corresponding talk pages behave weirdly even if you disable subpages
for main namespace.  Things that begin with a slash are especially
weird: [[/dev/null]] works fine in articles, but anywhere else it
links to [[currentpage/dev/null]], and you have to use [[:/dev/null]].

It would be easy to reenable subpages for article space, but you'd
probably want to manually rename all the articles (non-redirects)
containing slashes, to avoid strange behavior.  I count 30,163 or so
as of ten days ago when the toolserver was up-to-date.  It's probably
easier to use talk page subpages instead of whatever you want to use
the main namespace subpages for.