[Wikipedia-l] Proposal for a "#PARENT" command

[Steven Barker]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 10:53:12PM -0800, Simon Kissane wrote:
> Some have said that the advantage of having subpages
> is that every subpage has a link to its parent page.
> We could still keep that functionality, with a little
> extra work, if we added a "#PARENT" command.

Subpages have two useful characteristics:
 1) the subpages link back to the parent (so [[Baseball/History]]
    automatically links back to [[Baseball]]).
 2) If you know the parent page, you can easily guess where a subtopic is
    without guessing how it is named (cf [[World War II/Normandy]])

The suggestion of a #PARENT command is good at providing the first part, but
does nothing for the second.

I propose that instead of #PARENT we make it so that a command
"#CHILD foo bar" on [[foo]] aliases [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] (which should have
an independantly meaningful name).  [[baz]] would get an automatic backlink
to [[foo]] and to any other pages that name it as a child (and perhaps
include what it is refered to on those pages?).  The Wikipedia software
could then resolve all links to [[foo/bar]] to [[baz]] automatically.

This would let locations like [[World_War_II/Normandy]] move to some other
name without loosing it's obviousness, and [[History of Baseball]] be both
[[Baseball/History]] and [[History/Baseball]].

Perhaps we could allow multiple levels of redirection so that I could link
to [[World War II/Midway/Order of battle]] without having any idea what the
real name of that page might be.  This might cause problems if intermediate
subpages do not exist, but that could be worked out (after all, Unix
filesystems can do all of this).

Of course automating this shouldn't be an excuse to not introduce subtopics
inline in the article, but they would allow more simple expression of ideas
that *do* fit into a hierarchical structure.

Steve aka [[BlckKnght]]

-- 
Steven Barker                                      scbarker at uiuc.edu
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