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