Talk:Get rid of subpages entirely
Whee. There's a problem here -- the idea being that subpages are perceived by some to be a good thing, and perceived by others to be a bad thing. This is a very bad thing -- and let me see if I can shed some light on why -I- consider some sort of subpage functionality to be a good idea:
Subpages create a 'namespace' capability -- the ability to create an article with a singular name, and associate several articles with it. For example, the use of the word Canon is different in several contexts, from literature to religion to computer science. If you're looking for a specific meaning of a word, and examples of it, then subpages make sense -- the main entry (say Canon) could say something approximating the general attributes of something described as canon (say, "the most-defined, most correct form for something"), and then a subpage for Religious, a subpage for Literature, a subpage for Computer Science. However, the subpage capability as it was implemented was not enough for this function -- because it was too time-consuming and too resource-intensive to build the list of backward links to a given topic.
Subpages also limit the number of "write collisions" on a page, when properly constructed. When there are two or more people writing on the same document at the same time, it's impossible for their editing agents to talk with each other to figure out how to do so appropriately without losing data. SOMEONE always ends up the loser. When this number grows to 25 or 30, only one can win, leaving the remainder out in the cold -- causing even more problems, frustration, and eventually unsubmitted text. With subpages in place, one person can edit one subpage, another can edit another, and the scope of the write collisions can be minimized -- even though they still exist with subpage existence, they're nowhere near as bad.
I tend to think that the Wiki system (in any incarnation) is not appropriate for concurrent editing -- but automatic subpage creation could be a GOOD thing, to save text that would otherwise be lost in the ether. But that would require subpages to still exist -- and to do things behind the scenes to cause the main article to link to them, else their existence might get lost until someone decides to play "clean-up" and go to the "orphans" page.
(And for those who dislike them as subpages, call them "nodes", like the Everything system at http://www.everydevel.com/ does -- set it up so that any new submission generates a new node, and then edit it into the main document. Or, if you want to have multiple 'sections' of an article, create subpages/nodes for each section, and then pull their information into a single view -- each section independently editable by people who are knowledgeable about that section.)
The loss of subpages in their current form, in my opinion, is not a bad thing. However, SOME form of subpage functionality is going to be necessary to scale the database in a structured, consistent manner.
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