Help:Subpages

From Science Europe Data Glossary

This is a ShoutWiki help page, hosted at ShoutWiki Hub. If you want to suggest changes, leave a message on its talk page. If you want to replace this page with a custom help page for your wiki, click the create button above.

Subpages add an element of hierarchical organization into your wiki, with levels of the hierarchy of a page separated by slashes (/).

Where it works

By default, ShoutWiki has the subpage feature turned on for the following namespaces:

  • Main and Talk
  • User and User talk
  • Project and Project talk
  • File talk
  • MediaWiki talk
  • Template and Template talk
  • Help and Help talk
  • Category talk

To have the feature turned on in a namespace not on this list, contact the customer support team.

Likewise, when requesting a custom namespace for your site, please specify if you would like subpages activated.

In namespaces where the feature is switched off, any forward slashes (/) within a page name are simply part of the page name and do nothing special.

When subpages are enabled in a namespace, a forward slash in the title of a page always causes the page to be a subpage, even when this is not intentional or desirable.

How it works

Slashes (/) within a page name break the page into parent and subpages, recursively, e.g.:

  • Help:Subpages – this page
  • Help:Subpages/subpage – child page
  • Help:Subpages/subpage/sub-subpage – grandchild page
  • Help:Subpages/subpage/sub-subpage/sub-sub-subpage – great grandchild page
  • Help:Subpages/subpage/sub-subpage/sub-sub-subpage/sub-sub-sub-subpage – great great grandchild page

You can link directly to any page's subpage using the normal [[page name]] notation. If you want to link to a subpage of the page you are editing you can use [[/example]] or [[/example/]], which will hide the / in the link.

There are two magic words to split the name of a subpage: {{BASEPAGENAME}} and {{SUBPAGENAME}}. There is also a parser function {{#titleparts:}} for finer control.

Note that the part of page names after a slash is case sensitive including the first letter.

Breadcrumb links will appear automatically at the top of the subpage, linking to each parent page that exists. These links do not appear, however, if the parent pages have not yet been created or if the subpage feature is turned off. As these automatic breadcrumb links are not in the page content, the breadcrumbs do not place parent pages in the What links here and Related changes lists.

Use of subpages

There are various uses for the subpage feature. Some of the typical usages of subpages are:

  • to create archives of old discussions on a talk page
  • to create scratchpad editing spaces under a user page
  • to create other language versions of a document in multilingual wikis

Subpages are useful for organising information hierarchically. On the other hand, subpages tend to have a long name that is hard to remember, so it may be more user-friendly to use them as little as possible. You can also organize pages with the category feature, which is more suitable for creating a hierarchical network of information.

Displaying subpages

Subpages can be listed by transcluding Special:PrefixIndex.