I wished for: >> 1. A desire for a department to have "their own space" on the wiki.
S Page asked: >I assume you looked at enabling subpages in the main namespace?[1] >That way Human Resources/Payroll/Show_me_the_money gets a nice breadcrumb up >to Payroll >and Human Resources landing pages. Interesting idea, but I think subpages also bring penalties that are pretty significant. I discuss these in my book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596519681.do): - Linking to subpages is quite cumbersome. The names get very long, and you wind up doing lots of [[foo/bar/blat/a/b/c | alt text]] links which add complexity to editing the page. We find that this discourages people from adding links to pages. - When you enable subpages for a large community, they start using them instead of categories. In other words, users now have a choice between putting "Benefits" in the Human Resources category, or creating "Human Resources/Benefits." As a result, some Benefits pages end up in the Benefits category while others end up as subpages, making the "Benefits" category incomplete. An incomplete category can be worse than no category at all, because people look in it, don't find what they want, and assume it doesn't exist. Also, I'd rather have a category with 200 members than a page with 200 subpages. - MediaWiki's UI does not indicate whether a page has subpages. There are extensions to solve this, but I haven't found one that integrates seamlessly into the user's daily experience the way (say) category links do. For our large wiki, we decided that subpages in the main namespace are not worth these disadvantages. Hope this was interesting, DanB _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
