Help:Subpages

Subpages introduce some hierarchical organization into wiki pages, with levels of the hierarchy separated by slashes (/).

Where it works

By default, MediaWiki's subpage feature is turned off in the main namespace, but can be used on talk pages and user pages. See Help:Namespaces. In namespaces where the feature is switched off, any slashes (/) within a page name are simply part of the page name and do nothing special.

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

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

In subpages, a link back to antecedent pages will automatically appear at the top. These links do not appear, however, if the antecedent pages have not yet been created.

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 under 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.

Tip for wiki admins: You can specify the namespaces to have the subpage feature enabled with $wgNamespacesWithSubpages array.

See also

• Meta:Help:Link#Subpage feature
• Help:Variables#Page names