Gareth Owen wrote:
In which case I'd like to express my vehement opposition to this view. I believe that Television/Band, Nirvana/Band and Catatonia/Band are ideal places for those articles.
O.k., I'm more or less with you here, and this is part of what I keep stumbling over when I think about this. My first objection here is that [[Nirvana/Band]] under the current system will have a link at the top of the page to [[Nirvana]], which probably doesn't make that much sense.
Indeed, [[Band/Television]], [[Band/Nirvana]], and [[Band/Catatonia]] make more sense to me *from this point of view*: each of these pages will have an automatic link to [[Band]], which would then presumably be a broad overview of bands, or something of that sort.
Now, I'm _especially_ interested in this argument, which I think is much more compelling than your band example:
Similarly its far easier remember how to link to [[Baseball/History]] (especially from [[Baseball/World Series]], say) than to remember if its [[History of Baseball]] or [[The History of Baseball]] or [[Baseball History]]...
I think that's absolutely right. Whether or not it is _compelling_, I'm not sure.
One thing to keep in mind is that (as far as I can tell) the *only* thing special about subpages is that they auto-link back to the parent page. We would "technically" have done away with subpages if we simply omitted that feature, and treated '/' as an ordinary character like '_' or ':'.
So in part, this isn't a debate about "subpages", but about "naming conventions", and in my mind, I keep mixing the two issues up.
Similarly /Talk pages are great, and handy, if they're used for discussing the accompanying article rather than tedious meta-discussion best kept here, which, a few vociferous eejits aside, they are.
Yes!
I think we are all in agreement that /Talk is such an integral part of our culture that we want to make them into a special case, a separate talk: namespace, that is automatically there for every article.
The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.
I agree.
I think people are suggesting that the subpages system leads people to be "lazy" about coming up with page names. But laziness isn't always a bad thing, of course. Lazy is good if it means more accidental linking, or more easy-to-guess linking. A consistent system of naming pages is necessary for that.
There are some articles that are naturally sub-articles under a bigger article. [[World War II/Iwo Jima]] makes sense to me instantly, and I also know instantly that it is different from [[Iwo Jima]].
[[World War II/Iwo Jima]] is the story of the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II: what happened there? Why was it important?
[[Iwo Jima]] is the more general story of the island, a CIA factbook style article telling the history of the island, who lives there now, what their economy is, what impact WWII had on these things, etc.
How would the anti-sub-pages crowd answer the argument that this is a natural and intuitive naming scheme that should be preserved? And that alternatives such as [[Iwo Jima in World War II]] and [[The Battle of Iwo Jima]] and [[Battle of Iwo Jima]] are going to be a lot harder to 'accidentally' link to from elsewhere?
--Jimbo