Oy! Once more into the breach. :-)
Before I reply, let me say I am puzzled why we're still talking about this. Either you're asking for an explanation of my decision to eliminate subpages (which is fine!), or, perhaps, you are expressing disagreement that it should have been made so soon (that, too, would be fine). But no one has explicitly said the latter. In fact, it looks like the discussion is neither--it just looks like you're arguing about whether we should have subpages, and I don't quite see what the point of doing that, per se, is.
What do you think?
Anyway, to reply:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
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.
As soon as we move to Magnus' software, the obvious solution will be [[Nirvana (rock band)]], etc.
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.
Well, it might be easier for somebody to remember [[Baseball/History]] if he created or worked on that page, but if he had created [[history of baseball]], he'd no doubt find *that* easy to remember. The fact is that having subpages doesn't make pagenames any easier to remember. It is just a system, which implies one indeed reasonably easy way to remember page titles. Other systems that do not use subpages might be just as easy. Then of course there's the problem that we won't know what pages use subpages and what ones don't; eliminating them altogether at least reduces the number of possibilities. So, on the whole, I think eliminating subpages will make it easier for us to remember page titles.
For me, the question doesn't turn on this issue, however.
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.
On my view, it's about those things and a bit more. Having subpages actually can change ("force," "direct") the content of articles, and this can be a bad thing. See
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons
for this and other arguments.
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.
In other words, we can have the same functionality of /Talk pages without subpages.
The failing of subpages is that there is no clear policy for naming them.
I agree.
Well, I think there are a lot more failings than that. See the above URL.
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?
I would answer that it's one naming scheme, but it has no great advantages over the combination of [[Iwo Jima]] and one of the names just mentioned (e.g., [[Battle of Iwo Jima]]). It's no harder to "accidentally" link to from elsewhere. Making battles subpages of wars is more or less a matter of convention, and other intuitive conventions can be learned if they indeed make some intuitive sense. E.g., if we get into the habit of naming battles without the definite article and using their most common names, then anyone who wants to try to guess at the name could correctly guess the name of the article is "Battle of Iwo Jima" (if that's the common name--I don't know if it is :-) ).
There are *other* significant disadvantages to subpages, which I won't rehearse here--you can find them on
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons
--Larry