User:DavidJCobb/Editor's Guide/Subpages

There are many ways that articles on a wiki can be related. Links can provide a very weak connection between two articles; categories can provide a decently strong connection. But what if you have a group of articles where links aren't enough, but a category would be overkill? Something like, for example, this Editor's Guide?

In such a case, subpages are appropriate.

What Is A Subpage?

A subpage is just another relationship that can exist between articles. Subpages are hierarchical -- they work like a family tree. A page that has subpages is a parent; the subpages are children of the parent and siblings of each other.

What Do Subpages Look Like?

User:DavidJCobb/Editor's Guide/Subpages

Note the forward slashes. Those separate the article names -- just like a file path in Windows or a file path in a URL. So, from that title and those slashes, we can determine that User:DavidJCobb/Editor's Guide/Subpages is a subpage of User:DavidJCobb/Editor's Guide, which in turn is a subpage of User:DavidJCobb. This allows for a very neat form of organization without using categories -- my Editor's Guide isn't notable enough to get its own category, so I've written all of its entries as subpages to keep them grouped.

When you're in a subpage, you'll see a small breadcrumb menu near the page's title; each "crumb" is an ancestor of the subpage.

Creating Subpages

Let's say we want to add a subpage named Bar to Help:Foo.

1. Go to the base page -- the page you want to add a subpage to. We'll use Help:Foo as an example.
2. Now that you're at Help:Foo, look at the address/location bar on your web browser. You'll notice that the title of the base page is at the end of this URL. Add "/Bar" to it, and hit Enter (or press Go, etc.) to go to the new URL.
3. You'll find yourself on Help:Foo/Bar, looking at the standard message shown when a page does not exist. Choose to create the page, type your content, save, and the subpage will be created.

Links

Linking to...	From...	Syntax	Result
Help:Foo/Bar	anywhere	[[Help:Foo/Bar]]	Help:Foo/Bar
Help:Foo/Bar	Help:Foo	[[/Bar]]	Help:Foo/Bar
Help:Foo	Help:Foo/Bar	[[../Bar]]	Help:Foo
Help:Foo/What	Help:Foo/Bar	[[../What]]	Help:Foo/What