Talk:Goals

"Tied" to the history page?
Intro says "The section two pages should be tied to the history page".

One way to do that is to make them subpages using a slash, eg "Latin/morphology". The subpage then has an automatically-created backlink at its top, and can be linked to, in its parent page, with just a slash and the name, eg /morphology. However, you show from your already-created pages that you want to have links at the top of the history page to the subpages. That (with maybe repeating the links at the bottom) a good idea (and very simple to do with the "model" page I've given you). With that list in place, there would be little need for further links in the body of the history unless it extended to several screenfuls. And the slash in the link looks a bit untidy in text - "As the reader will learn from the /morphology page, ..."; to avoid that, you'd need to add a piped link, which is more work rather than less. Also, it won't help to shorten links between subpages.

An alternative type of subpage works well on the Towns, Villages and Cities Wikia. There it's described as "subsidiary pages". Instead of a slash you have a colon, eg "Latin:morphology". Disadvantage is no automatic backlink. Advantage is that you can use the software's "piped link" facility (without having to type anything after the pipe) to link easily from the text of the parent page or any of the subsidiary pages to any of the subsidiary pages, eg if you type " Latin:morphology " it appears in the text as "morphology" (with no messy slash) but links properly to "Latin:morphology". The piped link system links to where it should but displays by cutting off the colon and what precedes it (just as if it were a namespace prefix).

With either of those, the best "text display" will be obtained if your subpages or "subsidiary pages" use the Wikia standard "sentence case" instead of Title Case. And with either of those you will have to do some multiple repasting of the Goals page table; so it may be worth more than just a moment's thought.

You could do well to liaise with Dr Joe Kiff, the prime mover of the Psychology Wikia, who has tackled such problems in a massive way from small beginnings such as yours.

Robin Patterson 01:09, 23 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the help and advice. I like the subsidiary system better; I'll try to implement it into the existing and future language pages. By "sentence case" and "title case," do you mean the type of capitalization of the page names?


 * Archonia 05:52, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, "sentence case", the Wikia and Wikipedia standard, has no capitals except for the very first letter of the name and any proper nouns. "Title Case" has capitals for all words considered important by the author; opinions vary, so another author may have difficulty knowing where to capitalise; that may lead to duplication if an author searches for a particular title and doesn't find it because the page has different capitals. Robin Patterson 12:49, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Apparent oddities in the table
A few lines look odd: Robin Patterson 12:49, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Proto-Afro-Asiatic has nothing in other columns except the last: "Afro-Asiatic"; OK if "other" is explained
 * 2) Proto-Indo-European has nothing in other columns except the last: "Indo-European"
 * 3) Latin has "Old Latin" in the last column
 * 4) Latin Oscan has just "Latin:" as the page prefix for columns 2 and 3