Talk:Christian Kane/Steve Carlson

Not a gardener, but I don't think you can make this a top level page without changing the name of the page. The forward slash automatically makes it a subpage of whatever text comes before the slash--in this case, Christian Kane. If you wanted to change the name of the page to Christian/Steve, it would become a subpage of Christian. However, I took a look at the Christian Kane page, and it doesn't list this page as a subpage.--æthel 21:19, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I thought there was some magic they could work to fix that so that you can name pages with slashes. I'll leave it be, and if not, then we'll have to re-think the name.--facetofcathy 22:10, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

You can always name pages with slashes, but the wiki interprets them as subpages. I don't know how the coding works behind the scenes, but I treat subpages as a state of mind: as long as we can get to the page and read or edit the content, it doesn't matter whether the wiki thinks it's a subpage or not. Any pairing page with a slash in it is a subpage from a technical point of view, but in practice we don't think of, say, the Harry/Draco page as the Draco subpage of the Harry page.--æthel 00:41, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, I asked about the name on the DW comm and no one spoke up to say it would be an issue. The Help page on naming a page says to avoid making page names with virgules, but do it if you must and then doesn't say anything else. By looking at the Keifer/Lou page, I think I should have made this page first and the Christian Kane page after and that would have avoided the problem. --facetofcathy 01:08, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

It's a basic issue with subpages I think we're just ignoring at this point. The help pages are still a work in progress, but there's more about how subpages work on Help:Subpages. From what the page says, I'm not sure it would have made a difference if you had made the Christian Kane page later.

Actually, I just thought of a hack to get around the subpage issue: name the page with some symbol other than a /, like Kiefer_Lou, then use the DISPLAYTITLE template to add the / back to the title. But maybe there's a reason it hasn't been tried.--æthel 02:06, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

The problem is, as soon as someone makes a wikilink to Kiefer/Lou, it will either turn up red and they'll create it, not realizing it's a dupe, or they'll make a redirect to Kiefer_Lou - which will create the subpage regardless, it'll just be a subpage that redirects elsewhere and confuses people. Everyone would have to change the way they refer to pairings on the wiki to make it work. So it's simpler just to leave pairing pages with slashes in them, and cope with the subpage issue (like you said, it's a state of mind thing *g*). You *can* work around it by not using full names for the pairing, if they're not commonly used in the fandom; "Harry/Draco" wouldn't show up as a subpage of Harry Potter-the-character because the character page is Harry Potter/Harry Potter (or eventually, Harry Potter (Character), if we pull everything out to top level). The page "Harry" would be a disambiguation page that wouldn't list subpages of itself. So this could be Christian/Steve, if people use the first names, or Kane/Carlson if they use last names. (And you're right, it doesn't make a difference when a given page is created; the wiki sees anything after a slash as a subpage, regardless of which came first, subpage or top-level page.) --Arduinna 07:31, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

It could totally be called Chris/Steve, if that would solve the issue, I'm cool with that. I'm cool with leaving it as is and handwaving away the subpage problem too. I was in SGA fandom, I know how to handwave stuff. --facetofcathy 12:28, 27 March 2010 (UTC)