[Wikipedia-l] Subpages for user & talk pages

[Erik Moeller]

Folks,

when the whole subpage discussion first came up, Larry Sanger wrote:
"Subpages would be nice, I suppose, for other namespaces, like the Wikipedia
namespace and the User namespace." I have just added namespace-specific subpage
support to Wikipedia. This means that we can now enable subpages selectively for
only the User & Talk namespaces. I suggest doing so.

Currently users are already creating pages like:

  [[User:Eloquence/Wikipedia Manifesto]]
  (not a real page).

With subpage support enabled, it would be possible to just type

  [[/Wikipedia Manifesto]]

on the respective page, and the link would automatically go to the above
page. Furthermore, the "Wikipedia Manifesto" page would provide an automatic
backlink to [[User:Eloquence]].

Similarly; users are archiving talk pages like this:

  [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 1]] [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 2]] [[Talk:Main
Page/Archive 3]]

Again, here we can simply type

  [[/Archive 1]] [[/Archive 2]] [[/Archive 3]]

and have automatic backlinks on the archive pages.

When the new Wikipedia software was developed, it was decided not to support
subpages for the reason that they would disturb the Wikipedia article
structure. I agree with this reasoning, but it is not valid for user and talk
pages. Since we now have the ability to turn on subpages selectively, I see no
reason not to do so. We could also globally enable them on wikis where they
might be useful, e.g. Meta. 

Regards,

Erik

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