(Any) disadvantages of subwebs?

I'm thinking about changing hierarchy/structure of my wiki.

Currently, I have no sub-webs. Some topics are children of other topics which are children of another.

Should I create sub-webs? I checked TopicsAndWebs, but I still have some doubts:

Is creating a sub-webs good practice for creating proper structure of wiki?
should I expect any issues with converting to sub-webs - for example related with searching or including topics?
what are the differences between Foswiki sub-webs and Mediawiki namespaces

-- MateuszKDzior - 25 Sep 2015

Personally, I don't recommend use of sub-webs if the only purpose is content organization which can as effectively be done with parent/child relationships or, if you want more complex content organization, ClassificationPlugin. The main reasons I see to separate content into webs has to do with access rights and notification. If you want to restrict access to a set of topics, it's easier to have them in a single web and add the restrictions to the web. Likewise, if you have a work-team that wants to get notifications of changes to a particular set of topics, it's easiest to group all those topics in one web and then the team-members can subscribe to WebNotify in that web.

A few of the "down-sides" to using sub-webs include:

There is some performance hit for using sub-webs although I've never found this to be a huge issue.
WikiWord links to topics in other webs (including sub-webs) must include the web reference.
By default, WebSearch first searches only the current web.

I'm afraid I am not familiar enough about MediaWiki namespaces to give a thorough answer to your last question, however I believe they are more similar to using ClassificationPlugin then to sub-webs.

If you find that you do need to do some major re-organization of your content - either to break a web into multiple webs or visa-versa - you might take a look at CopyContrib which is very useful for bulk content-moving actions.

-- Main.LynnwoodBrown - 28 Oct 2015 - 17:59