[Wikipedia-l] Subsections

[Jimmy Wales]

Larry Sanger wrote:
> I'd like to see one example of an article, or a class of articles, that
> would be clearly improved by being put in article-with-subsections form,
> rather than simply broken into a series of shorter articles.

It might not be that the _articles_ are improved, but the _search
engine_ and _navigation in general_.  Maybe.  :-)

The example I have in mind: Iwo Jima.  It's a place.  Most people who search
for Iwo Jima are not looking for general information about the place, though.
Mostly people are interested in Iwo Jima because of the important WWII battle
fought there.

A search for Iwo Jima could look like either of these:

WITHOUT SUBSECTIONS
[[Iwo Jima]]
[[Iwo Jima In World War II]]
[[Major Battles of the Pacific Theater in WWII]]

WITH SUBSECTIONS
[[Iwo Jima]]
[[World War II]] -- subsection on "Iwo Jima as a turning point"
[[Major Battles of the Pacific Theater in WWII]] -- subsection on "Iwo Jima"

----

The second and third examples are different.  In one case, I am imaginging that
the article would actually be written differently.  Instead of having a short 
[[World War II]] article and lots of independent articles, we have a longer
article with subsections.  There are pros and cons to this.

But in the third case, I'm imagining that the article is written the
exact same way in both cases -- but we now have a means to call
special attention to the fact that the article does contain a
subsection on Iwo Jima, rather than merely _mentioning_ Iwo Jima.
This seems a net improvement.

----

One of the mistakes of Nupedia was that we tried to design the perfect system
a priori, including grandiose visions of XML-marked-up text to permit all kinds
of fancy searching.  :-(

At Wikipedia, we take things simpler.  But if something is harmless (and ONLY
if it is harmless), we might add it.

--Jimbo