Wikipedia:Subpages

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This page is considered a guideline on Wikipedia. It illustrates standards of conduct, which many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy. Feel free to update the page as needed, but please use the discussion page to propose major changes.


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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]]. 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.

Contents

Allowed uses

  1. Drafts of major article revisions, i.e. [[Example Article/Temp]] (These can also be subpages of the article's talk page.) Do not use subpages for permanent content that is meant to be part of the encyclopedia.
  2. User subpages - making extra pages within your own user namespace. i.e. [[User:Example/Draft of article]] or [[User:Example/About me]].
  3. WikiProject subpages - for project-specific templates, discussion, or guidelines pages.
  4. Dividing up Wikipedia process pages (e.g Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, etc.) which would otherwise get too big to be easily used.
  5. Talk page archiving - both article Talk and User_talk pages are typically archived by moving discussion to numbered subpages. This allows the discussion to still be searchable, rather than requiring a hunt through the page history.

How to create User subpages

To create a User subpage:

  1. Edit your user page and add a link like: [[/name of subpage]] and save the page.
  2. Then click on the new link; the text box that appears will allow you to edit the new subpage.
  3. Put whatever you wanted to add there.

We encourage people to create subpages of their own user page if this allows you to better organize your personal content. However, Wikipedia is not a free host - using your user page (or subpages) for content unrelated to writing an encyclopedia is frowned upon, and content can and will be deleted if violations are egregious.

History of subpages

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 Wikipedia:Do not use subpages policy had to be rigorously enforced, as well as retroactively applied. The new (mid-2004) category system supports hierarchical 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:").

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