[Wikipedia-l] No subpages. Is that your final answer?

[Jimmy Wales]

First of all, let me apologize to everyone for even having this
conversation.  I really wasn't aware of all that had gone before,
including the fact that Larry had already made a decision based on
existing consensus.  

lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> No, parentheses are for context to disambiguate the main term,
> not for sub-domains.  Again, there's already a standard body of
> knowledge for how to do this: real encyclopedias.  I'm the first
> to point out that we aren't constrained by paper here, but there's
> no reason we can't learn from the existing scholarship about how
> to organize and title knowledge.  This has been going on for a
> long time, and they're very good at it. 

That's certainly true!

> "Automatic" things are great when they are things that a stupid
> computer can figure out.  Associations between ideas are at the
> bottom of that list.  Human beings should determine those.

O.k., that's a good counter-argument.

How about this...

There seems to be agreement that we could use the new software for the
meta-wikipedia, where we want all commentary _about_ the encyclopedia
to go.  Why don't we start that one without subpages, and then live
with it for a little while there.  This will give us real world
experience.  If we find that we don't miss subpages, then when we move
the full encyclopedia over to the new software, we can just re-align
the subpages, and be happy with it, secure in the knowledge that we
aren't giving up anything useful.



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