[Wikipedia-l] Subpages for user & talk pages

[Erik Moeller]

Jimbo wrote:
> The cost is that we are adding syntax in one part of wikipedia that
> new users will discover and come to expect throughout all of
> wikipedia.  Increasing the befuddlement of newcomers is always a bad
> thing, although it can sometimes be overcome if there is a very very
> strong and compelling reason.

No, it's the other way around. If we only allow subpages without really
supporting them (as we *do now* with archive pages and user subpages), new users
will see this link style: "User:Eloquence/foo" and create similar pages
elsewhere. I have already seen this -- users try to create subpages because they
see them in the user & talk namespace. Others then have to rename these pages.

If we explicitly support subpages, users will *still* have to learn that
they are not supposed to create them elsewhere, but we can provide an automatic
info message that tells them why (not currently implemented, but would be
easy to do). This is because with real subpages, you just have to type "/foo",
and we don't have any articles that start with a "/", so we can autodetect
when people are doing this and provide a warning message.

Using Wikipedia is a learning process; this cannot be avoided. Implementing
subpages properly instead of merely tolerating them makes learning where and
where not to use them easier. 

Regards,

Erik

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