[WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Emily Monroe<bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>> The navboxes would be so much better if they didn't pollute "what
>> links here".
>
> I personally like navboxes.
>
> I usually use "what links here" to check if an article is orphaned or
> not. What do you use it for?

To see what other articles an article is linked from (i.e. mentioned
in). It can help when looking through such a list to think "why is
this article linked from this one?" You may be wondering why the Nobel
Prize winner in 2000 (for example) is linked from the page of the
winner in 1976. Then you realise it is because the 2000 prize winner
is linked from the navbox on the 1976 winner's page, and is not
mentioned in the article text for the 1976 winner.

In other words, I like using "what links here" to find out when
something is mentioned in the article *text*, rather than when it is
merely mentioned in a navbox template. One of the problems though is
that links from an *infobox* are more relevant, so I would want those
to be in "what links here", so cutting out templates altogether is not
good. But being able to *filter out* the "links from transcluded
templates" (and also list which templates they are coming from) would
be the ideal solution.

Let me find an article without a navbox, and with a nice "what links
here" list, to show what I mean.

OK, I picked the current featured article (which I should warn might
shock some):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Rosewood+massacre&namespace=0

Limited the list to articlespace.

All those are (at first glance) relevant links.

But if you do the same for Ahmed Zewail, first limit to template namespace:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Ahmed+Zewail&namespace=10

You see he is linked from three navbox templates.

Now look at the links from article space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Ahmed_Zewail&namespace=0&limit=250

Lots and lots of people listed there. Who are they? Maybe people he
has worked with? Maybe people he is related to, or otherwise has a
reason to be linked to from, or mentioned in their articles? But no.
Most of them are links only because he appears in a template at the
bottom of their page, and they both won the same award, sometime years
apart.

Even worse, there might be genuine links in there that could be
followed up to find useful snippets of information not in the original
article. Sure, you need to verify with a reliable source, but this is
one way to build up articles, and the pollution of "what links here"
with links from navboxes makes this useless.

It can *also* obscure whether an article is orphaned.

Consider the case where the *only* links in "what links here" are due
to being in a navbox template. The article would appear to be linked
from many articles, but it would not be linked from anywhere (or very
few places) in *real* text in other articles.

Now do you see the problem I'm getting at here?

Carcharoth