Talk:Plato

The original title of the book known IN ENGLISH as The Republic has nothing to do with elective government. The Greek word was Politeia, a word that translates fairly well as "Regime" or "sytem of government." Don't go all un-neutral on the book in the entry. I don't like Plato's ideal state either, but the title "Republic" is Cicero's, I think. --MichaelTinkler

I see no reason to have "Complete works of Plato" as a separate topic; it should be a subpage. If the actual works are entered into the Wikipedia later, they may also be subpages of Plato. --AV

The presumption should be against webpages. If we were to have made every topic that could be made a subtopic of a main topic, we'd have a disaster on our hands. Don't you think that it's interesting that most of the Wikipedia old hands are solidly against subpages? You're new here, Anatoly--you probably don't understand entirely, yet. --LMS

---

More arguments on why "Complete works" should be a subpage:

Larry, both in Naming conventions and in your essay on subpages, the only reason advanced against subpages is that the topic of the subpage may be of independent interest rather than totally subsumed within the topic of the page.

I do not have just one reason. I have three essays that address the issues surrounding subpages.

I'm soon going to start pushing hard to eliminate subpages entirely. I'm going to ask that they be completely eliminated from the PHP wiki.

Now, in this particular case, I feel strongly that you're pushing it too far. What else do you need "Complete works of Plato" for if not in the context of Plato??

The context of "complete works of philosophers." The context of works, generally. The context of philosophical texts. Etc.

Just about the only conceivable alternative is that of some general "Complete works of various authors" page with links to individual pages. But, first, the idea is rather ridiculous anyway, and, secondly, there's nothing stopping us from linking to subpages from outside the main page in case it's needed.

Why does there have to be a page that links to the complete works of all authors? I'm not sure what the use of that would be, actually.

OTOH, I believe that you fail to consider the benefit of proper subpaging.

I think you don't sufficiently appreciate why they're so evil.

It's not just about hierarchies, though it's about that; it's also about reducing the clutter in the main namespace,

This is not a problem, though. The sheer number of pages is going to be identical.

and reducing the number of ad hoc naming schemes. When you introduce something like "Complete works of Plato" as a name of an encyclopaedia topic, the readers will assume that it's a part of a general scheme, "Complete works of X" - but if there's only one or a few topic of this kind, then you're cluttering the conceptual field of the main namespace.

I don't see how using subpages avoids the same "problem." I don't quite understand how it's a problem in the first place, anyway.

What this means is that you give the readers another concept of how topics might be named (not just "X" or "History of X" or "the problem of X" or whatever, but now also "Complete works of X"), but the concept isn't really put to good use.

Why not? What's wrong with that concept?

Actually, I do think "X's works" would be better, but we don't have the use of apostrophes yet. Plato's works is where this information should be filed.

Finally, subpaging in such cases naturally helps establish better linking. This page already had a backlink to Plato; I removed it when I moved it to a subpage and you failed to restore it when moving it back. But ideally it shouldn't have a link to Plato because the connection to Plato is entirely obvious from the title itself. The backlink adds no useful information whatsoever, forms no new associations or connections. When it's moved to a subpage, the arrangement suddenly becomes much better: the backlink is now part of the general linkbar, an automatic feature of the subpage mechanism, and it draws no unnecessary attention of a reader. When it's needed, it's there; where it's not needed (in the body of the article), it's not.

This is an advantage, but it is an extremely weak one. One could make the same argument with regard to any plausible parent page-subpage pairing; but that by itself isn't a sufficient reason to make the subpage a subpage of the parent page. To be consistent, we would have to start making zillions of subpages of all sorts of topics, with no rhyme or reason, and setting up all sorts of conceptual relations and hierarchies that limit how we think and write about various topics. Besides, subpage titles are just plain ugly and cumbersome to deal with when linking to them from outside the main page-subpage article grouping. (As I've explained in my essays.)

I await with interest your response to these points. --AV

Keep working on the project for a few months and then see how you feel about subpages. I'm going to start an article about this in Wikipedia commentary--I'm going to raise the issue that we should entirely eliminate subpages from the new PHP wiki code, and convert foo/bar page titles in the present wiki to foo--bar in the new wiki. --LMS

---

I'm not Larry, but I'll point out that the page already had notes about textual history (by or not by Plato), a subject worth a page. --MichaelTinkler

About textual history of Plato's works, not textual history as a separate subject. And sure, it's worth a page, only there's no reason for this page not to be a subpage -- AV

Again, you assume that the presumption should be in favor of subpages, which it definitely shouldn't be. --LMS