Why can't I create pages with the same name under different parents?

[Maria Gutierrez]

I need to create several parent pages, each for a different concept, but they need to have the same set of child pages. For example:

Concept 1:

- FIs

- FURs

- INF

Concept 2:

- FIs

- FURs

- INF

Concept 3:

- FIs

- FURs

- INF

But Confluence won't let me have several pages with the same name on the same space. Since pages have an internal ID I don't understand why the title needs to be unique. 

Please advice. 

[Aishvarya Verma]

Facing the same issue and am amazed that I am facing this in an enterprise application in today's day and age. I want to create a hierarchy of similar themes sub-pages for all the modules in my project and am unable to do this. 

Request Atlasssian team to prioritise this fix as it's been over an year and the fact that this issue is still coming up is unfortunate. To favour speed, giving up on basic functionality does not seem helpful. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This is not an "issue" that needs a "fix".

Atlassian is not going to change this, it is the way it is intended to be.  Confluence is a wiki, and that's how they work.

[Aishvarya Verma]

I can't speak on behalf of Atlassian or what they will or won't be doing. But, in my opinion they can choose to enhance this functionality, if the organisation believes that this is more than just a wiki!

Thought : Internally pages can be represented by unique Ids that will help ensure that each page can uniquely be linked in hierarchy, but the title of the page can be any string. This would give the users the flexibility to have any structure and organisation that they choose. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can't speak for them either, but I have asked in the past, and the responses can be summarised as "we have no plans to rewrite the whole thing in order to downgrade it to make it not a wiki"

[Aishvarya Verma]

Just because one didn't get a positive response in the past, does not justify that this couldn't be a valid enhancement/feature. Also, I personally believe Atlassian would disagree to brand themselves as just a wiki. They market this product as a team collaboration space, where everything can be organised in a single place. Also, advanced search and page tree is one explicit feature mentioned here.

Now, why this is basic expectation is simply because of the way people are used to managing their files/documents online these days. Imagine Google Drive telling users that you can only create only one folder in your space/drive with a particular name. So, I would still request that Atlasssian should reevaluate this feature, but they can definitely choose not to. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Again, it's not an "enhancement".  It would be a downgrade. 

The comparison with google drive is wrong as well.  What does google drive do when you try to add a file with the same name as an existing one?

[Aishvarya Verma]

Not sure why it's considered a downgrade. Can you please explain

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Because you would be removing useful functionality.

[Aishvarya Verma]

That seems like an assumption. Who says that both the use-cases can't co-exist

[Sebastiano Cavicchio]

I just stumbled on this uniqueness "feature" and found this discussion... it is indeed annoying, and by the way the argument "Confluence is a wiki, and that's how they work" does not hold too... look at Mediawiki subpages:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Subpages/subpage

To create a similar structure Confluence basically forces the user to manually create the subpage hierarchy using the page title

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Erm, I don't think you've understood what the subpages page is saying.  You should re-read it and see that the sub-pages all have unique names and urls.

[Sebastiano Cavicchio]

Maybe we are not understanding each other... From the above link I understand that in Mediawiki by just adding a forward slash to the title of a page I can obtain a subpage and I can create multiple "forward slash plus same subpage title X" pages under different parent pages. The result I obtain is that each different parent page has its own "subpage X", even if the full name of the subpage is "Parent 1/subpage X", "Parent 2/subpage X" etc.... If I understand correctly, this is exactly what Confluence is lacking, forcing us to write a "Concept 1: FIs" subpage title, then a "Concept 2: FIs" subpage title, etc... with all the obvious side effects you can imagine.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, the mediawiki page has a different name.

Confluence doesn't create child pages that way, it's more sophisticated and doesn't need to do it that way, it does a full page tree.   But that's not what this conversation is about. 

The point here is the "subpage" has a different title.  It's the same as Confluence

[Paul Bieganski]

Forcing users to manually disambiguate child page names in a hierarchical structure is a major usability flaw (regardless of the "this is a wiki" arguments).  Its root cause is the co-mingling of page identification and page name - it is not technically necessary - it is a design/implementation choice (or flaw - depending on how you look at it). Other systems such as G-Drive keep document identity and document name separate, thus avoiding the issue altogether. Confluence will need a better answer than "this is a wiki" - not supporting duplicate child page names in a hierarchical system is plain silly.

[Sean Kubin]

From my understanding on this matter, Confluence long ago made the design decision to disallow creating identically named pages within the same Space.

While counter-intuitive to some, this may have been done to nudge users to embrace the weak tree-structure format and instead create new Spaces as needed. After all, this was a wiki, not a file system. Additionally, it supposedly keeps Confluence snappy.

Initially, it may have also been a technical limitation but that is no longer true (since 2021+?).

In any case, the decision appears set and not to be reconsidered any time soon—or ever.

So, how do we embrace and follow this architecture? 

For example, say we have the (contrived) desired structure in a single Space:

• Project A / Intro
• Project B / Intro

This won't work. Instead we must prefix (or suffix) to uniquely id pages:

• Project A / PA Intro
• Project B / PB Intro

Or perhaps:

• `Project A / Intro (PA)`
• `Project B / Intro (PB)`

Alternatively, whenever we run up against this limitation, it could be a smell that Confluence is hinting to us perhaps we should reconsider our organization.

Instead, we might choose to split into separate Spaces:

Project A Space

• Intro

Project B Space

• Intro

Are there any other approaches or organizational tips?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's a whole load of quite complex stuff behind this, but the short answer is that Confluence has only a weak tree structure and to keep it as simple and fast as possible, you need unique names within the space (that's assuming you want human names for pages and not random numbers that are meaningless to us)

You will need to come up with a different naming scheme, or look to split your concepts into spaces

[Maria Gutierrez]

Well... but coming up with a different naming scheme will be more complicated. And splitting it into different spaces doesn't work because we'll just end up with 50+ spaces that we didn't have before. 

Hopefully this will be solved in future versions. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, it will be more complicated, you'll need to balance that against having more spaces.

I'm afraid this hasn't changed since Confluence 1 and shows no signs of doing so.  Your only real solution is "stop using duplicate page names" for the foreseeable future.

[Maria Gutierrez]

That's very unfortunate.