WikiPedia:Subpages
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Subpages are pages separated with a "/" (a forward slash) from any article or talk page. (See also Subpage feature). Making a new [[link]] that begins with a / (slash) is the common way to start a subpage. The page to which this link points is considered "subordinate" to its host page, and is titled and linked as [[Article/Subpage]] or [[Talk:Article/Subpage]]. It is possible to create a subpage of a subpage (or a sub-subpage). At the top of each subpage or sub-subpage, you can find a backlink to the higher levels of the page.
Wikipedia allows subpages for non-encyclopedia articles only, meaning that any subpage should not be considered part of the encyclopedia. The only accepted use for subpages in the encyclopedia namespace is for making drafts of major article revisions. These can also be subpages of the article's talk page. Other common uses are:
- User subpages - making extra pages within your own user namespace. This includes talk page subpages for archiving old discussion.
- Wikipedia:WikiProject - subpages for particular wikiproject and their templates
- Wikipedia process pages, like Votes for deletion, cleanup etc.
We encourage people to create subpages of their own user page if this allows you to better organize your personal content. For talk pages and pages in the Wikipedia namespace, the primary use of subpages is to allow archiving of old material. Some pages receive a lot of discussion, and this allows us to keep the size of those pages manageable.
Subpages were originally used on Wikipedia to differentiate between subjects to create topical hierarchies of articles, but this proved unworkable because articles tend to belong in more than one hierarchy. The present system of disambiguation was adopted instead, and the m:Do not use subpages policy had to be rigourously enforced, as well as retroactively applied. The new (mid-2004) category system supports hierarchial organization while still allowing an article to belong to multiple categories.
The MediaWiki software supports selectively allowing or disallowing the creation of subpages in various namespaces. In namespaces where subpages are supported, you can create a subpage simply by linking to the name of the subpage, prefixed with a slash (e.g. [[/Archive]]). For Wikipedia, the User, Talk, and Wikipedia namespaces have subpages turned on; the main (article) namespace does not have this feature turned on, as strictly hierarchical organisation of articles is discouraged, and other distinctions are better made by placing pages in other namespaces (e.g. discussions go in "Talk:", and templates in "Template:").
Related topics
- m:Accidental linking and hard-wired category schemes
- m:Case against subpages
- m:Get rid of subpages entirely
- m:Mysterious wikipedia user subpages
- Wikipedia:Subpages to be moved
- m:Why I am suspicious of subpages
- Wikipedia talk:Do not use subpages
- Wikipedia talk:Subpages pros and cons
- Older discussion regarding the pros and cons of subpageshe:ויקיפדיה:דף_משנה
