[Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals

[Larry Sanger]

I've just finished going over the enormous set of interesting e-mails
about the problem re the "Middle Earth" subpages.  I just have a few
notes.  I am sure I haven't caught all the issues here but hopefully I've
said something useful on some of the important ones.

(1) There were *several really good* reasons not to have subpages.  Not
just one or two.  While I did concede that fictional worlds were prime
candidates (*if* any were) for subpage treatment, I did *not* concede that
the fact that they're useful for that purpose means that we should have
them.  In fact, the mere fact that subpage functionality existed meant
that subpages were used in all sorts of different ways.

(2) Those who have said that there's no difference between [[Foo/Bar]] and
[[Bar (Foo)]] have obviously not used subpages very much.  There's a huge
difference, and this has been discussed in depth before.

(3) I agree with Lee, Jimbo, Vicki, and I think a few others who
emphasized that it is very important to preserve the ease of editing
Wikipedia articles.  Tim's solution has the distinct advantage of making
it no more difficult to edit articles, while preserving keystrokes.

(4) When we think about policy options, it often helps to consider
carefully what problem we're trying to solve, and to make sure that our
solution is the most elegant solution to that problem.  It is not entirely
clear to me what the problem is, in this case.  Originally, Uri Yanover
said:

>The problem is in the following: it is extremely inconvenient
>(as a policy) to write "[[Middle Earth/Elrond|Elrond]] was
>the lord of [[Middle Earth/Rivendell|Rivendell]]" than it is
>to write "[[Elrond]] was the lord of [[Rivendell]]"

This suggests that the problem is *just* one involved in typing long page
titles in order to create a link, but the solution offered by Uri solves a
lot more than that, so I'm not sure this is exactly the problem he wants
to solve.

(5) *If* the problem is just that, then I'd agree with those who say that
Tim's solution is very neat and elegant, and we should move forward with
it.  We should probably also write a script that would allow sysops or
trusted users to rename large numbers of pages (and links) formatted
[[Foo/Bar]] as [[Bar (Foo)]].

(6) I see no particularly good reason why the name of an article about
Elrond needs to be named anything other than [[Elrond]] or [[Elrond
Peredhil]].  The whole point of so-called disambiguating parentheses (I
wrote a little column about these last year) is to disambiguate, not to
categorize.

(7) "Hear, hear" to Lee, or whoever it was, who said that article
structure *should* be flat.  This is a good thing!

Larry