Forum:Temporary forums/Subpage policy

Subpages
Draft 0.1, cobbled together from talk pages without regard for tonal consistency.

For a long time, I've had a Policy section on my user page listing a broad array of specific prescriptions or broader concerns. It's taken me a long time to realize, but many of them could be addressed by a subpage policy.

Motivation
Compared with best practices, subpages are direly underutilized on this wiki.

In Thread:264489, Shambala108 wisely ruled that character pages should only have 2-3 sentences per story. There are good reasons why we should limit the level of detail present on some pages of our wiki: it's been floated before, by CzechOut for instance, that publishers might eventually take exception to our detailed summaries of their stories. Notoriously, Chakoteya – the well-known curator of Doctor Who episode transcripts – once received a takedown request from Big Finish for hosting transcripts of some of their audios. How many degrees removed are our summaries from outright transcripts? This is something to keep in mind.

Our purpose as a wiki is to cover DWU-related stories and concepts as they exist, in whatever way will best serve DWU fans – the not we, who are often browsing on mobile, without Ctrl+F or familiarity with our citation formatting, and for a limited period of time. The reason we have rules like T:NPOV is because long ago we judged they were the best way to serve DWU fans as a wiki, not because promoting non-TV content was one of our priorities. Peter Capaldi's difficulty in finding relevant information on our wiki invites us to rethink our interpretation of T:NPOV. Realistically, TV information should be surfaced in, such as at The Beatles and Musée d'Orsay; by the same principle, much of the non-TV information in sections like Tenth Doctor should be relegated to subpages.

Broad rules
What is the use of a subpage? When a top-level section on a page is too big, create a subpage. By "top-level section", I mean a heading formatted with ==, such as "Biography" or "Plot". There should never be in-universe subpages: for instance, if the section Twelfth Doctor were deemed too big, we would move it to Twelfth Doctor/Biography, not Twelfth Doctor/Continued adventures with Clara.

Subpages are only meant to be linked to from their root page and navigation templates. For instance, Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances is only linked to from Twelfth Doctor and. For this reason, before creating a subpage, it's always worth asking whether it's possible to split the material without using subpages. For instance, I created The Doctor's early life and The Master's early life to cover conflicting accounts of their origins when First Doctor and The Master became too unwieldy. Other examples include pages for broadly-defined eras in the Doctor's life, such as Exile on Earth, and pages for specific events, like Operation Mannequin for the events of Rose. Following this principle, the solution to the length of The Master is splitting it into pages for incarnations, not simply hiding material in The Master/Biography or "incarnation subpages" like The Master/War Master.

After creating a subpage, link to it from the root page with and replace the copied text with a shorter summary of the information, emphasising details which are most likely notable to the not we. The same principles apply to the writing of lead paragraphs: you shouldn't need Ctrl+F or a lot of time to find the most important details about a topic. As an example, last night I wanted a quick refresher on Stanley Kubrick, and by skimming the first few paragraphs of on my phone, it was trivially easy to find his death date and most notable works within seconds. In contrast, right now you can't even answer the question (for instance) "what episode did the Twelfth Doctor regenerate in?" without scrolling 2/3rds of the way down Twelfth Doctor.

Applications

 * Our "list of appearances" pages are a classic example of how subpages should be used. Twelfth Doctor - list of appearances should be moved to Twelfth Doctor/List of appearances.
 * Similarly, BBC New Series Adventures covers should be BBC New Series Adventures/Covers.
 * We can use Twelfth Doctor/Biography to cover the character's biography in maximum detail while Twelfth Doctor gives a briefer overview.
 * Hell Bent (TV story) should be at Hell Bent (TV story)/Plot, with the synopsis on the page being much closer to Hell Bent (TV story) in length and detail. See also the contrast between Silver-Tongued Liars's #Summary and #Plot. Lengthy plot summaries being placed on subpages might also ameliorate Shambala's concerns about "hosting information [users] can get somewhere else".