Am I not able to have the same title for multiple pages on a wiki? I get an error when I create a page that has the same title as another page in the wiki.
Yes. That is correct.
All wiki systems have to have some unique identifier for a page. Confluence does it by using the space and title. You can't create pages with the same name in the same Space. (So foo:contacts and bar:contacts is fine, but you can see there's an immediate problem with foo:contacts and foo:contacts)
I see what you're saying. The pages I'm creating are actually subpages in the wiki. So the two the pages with the same title fall under two pages with different titles.
But they're not. I know they are in a parent:child relationship in the tree, but the urls for the pages are unique, and keyed by space and name only.
This has two huge advantages. For structured documentation (for example, product layouts, run books, project guidance), you know that standardised names and structures are there. So foo:contacts will take you to the only contacts page in foo, and when you go to bar:contacts, you'll get the only contacts page in there as well. Secondly, when people move pages, no links are broken because the parent page is not in the url (there's a third one too - you don't end up with ridiculously long urls, but that's minor)
So, you can't create duplicate pages.
This Scroll Versions plugin allows for duplicate page titles however it is a paid plugin
Don't forget the effect of duplicate page titles on Confluence search ... It could then be that the search results page shows a list of pages like that:
How will user find out, which contacts page is the one he's looking for? He probably has to click every page to find out.Contacts of Department A, Contacts of Department B, ... is a much better search result here. So I can understand, that Confluence uses the page title as a unique key.
The Scroll Versions plugin allows for duplicate page titles and this has the following effects:
Regards,Kirstin
That scheme works fine too. As long as you don't have duplicate names in the same space, because that breaks the search results as you're not able to uniquely identify a page in a space.
I'd much prefer Atlassian get off their high horse and implement what many of their customers have been asking for for years. MANY people use Confluence for documentation and want the native feature to have multiple pages of the same name in the same space.
The VERY EASY workaround would be to change the stupid URL structure to use a UID. I don't care what the URL says. It could be http://mysite/display/SPACE/PAGE which does nothing for me. I don't care that it says SPACE and PAGE. It could just as easily be http://mysite/display/UIDSTRING
A VAST majority of users are not hard-typing URLs into their browser, so having this as a UID is just fine. It's what EVERY major site uses...you don't go to YouTube and type in youtube.com/watch?v=cat-fighting-a-monkey for good reason. There are too many similar videos.
If it impacts search, it's only because search was designed poorly, and a simple workaround should suffice, e.g. showing full breadcrumb trail on mouseover or many other solutions.
In that case, they could display the path to the page instead of just the title....simple.
I also see the need for unique page names as a real problem.
The typical chapter structure in my technical documents looks like this:
But since I cannot use the same page name twice I am forced to create something like this:
I wouldn't mind about that if these page names where a purely technical setting. But they are not: My problem is that these page names are also the basis for the automatic table of content and for headings.
In other words:If I create a PDF document the table of content will look like the one above and if I go through the chapters they have headlines likes "2.3.4 PTF Maximum Premium II - Functions - Converters - Intelligent Temperature Control Tool - Implementation - Automatic Setting".
Doesn't that look pretty strange?
And if so, what would be the way to get out of that?
I perfectly agree with you. This has always been a big shortcoming of all wiki's, especially those that allow hierarchically structuring of their pages. Introducing hierarchy without releasing the constraint of unique page titles inside a space is a mistake. I assume there is a good intention behind this (keeping things simple). But as often this good intention generates the opposite: turning authoring hierarchically structured wiki spaces into a really complex and awkward task (considering all the suggested workarounds like prefixes, turning everything into a space that contains duplicate titles, making TOCs by hand etc.). And in the end even then you do not get what you really want. So, Attlassian, please please please: consider changing this. Either by not requiring space-uniqueness of page titles, or by providing optional page identifiers that will be used instead of the titles when specified. These identifiers could then be used for links etc. Solving this problem would open Confluence to whole new area of applications, an so turn it into a much better product.
It's not going to happen. Details are at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-2524
I've been using Confluence for documentation for all of 12 minutes and I've already encountered this shortcoming. We're integrating our help wiki with Zendesk Help Center, so my plan was to make our "Help Center" space's page hierarchy exactly match the Category/Section hierarchy of our Zendesk Help Center. However, where Zendesk allows multiple sections to have the same name, Confluence apparently does not. Zendesk, for all of the shortcomings of their help center as a CMS, had the foresight to use a URL format like Michael describes above. In fact, it's kind of the best of both worlds, as it includes UID followed by article name i.e. /sections/UID-Aricle-Name. It looks like they are appending the article name with the section ID. Too bad Confluence isn't doing something similar. Ugh.
The same problem for me...
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