[WikiEN-l] Linkage bloat

[Carcharoth]

Is there any chance for progress to be made on this? I recently ran
into this problem again at a featured article candidate I was
reviewing. It is has a very worthy 'National Historic Landmarks' set
of templates at the bottom, but unfortunately this leads to massive
template linkage bloat. Of the over 100 articles that link to this
article, I estimate that only three links are from within the text of
other articles - the rest are from the templates.

If I had been able to see at a glance that this article was linked
from two other articles, I would have been able to make a suggestion
to link back to those articles, and maybe link from other articles. As
it was, I was unable to do this and this caused some problems (which
it is best not to go into here).

So is there anyway to encourage or help with whatever needs to be done here?

Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:10 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> agreed. The footer templates are the biggest source of linkage bloat.
> the templates are useful, and we need some way of keeping track of
> what should be in them when we add or delete articles, but they make
> working with what links here for any practical purpose extremely
> difficult. They'd be much more helpful if they were separated.
>
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske
>>>> <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Many of these links are due to templates, which I can do little about.
>>>>
>>>> Can *anyone*, even in principle, do something about that? It really
>>>> bugs me that the "what links here" function doesn't distinguish
>>>> between links arising from templates (often not directly relevant) and
>>>> links directly from the article wiki-text. If the answer is something
>>>> to do with parsers, please do explain!
>>>
>>> Yes, it's possible. It was necessary to register links from templates
>>> in the pagelinks table so that when a page is deleted or created, the
>>> HTML caches can be updated so that the link colour will change. With a
>>> schema change and some parser work, it would be possible to flag such
>>> links so that they are optional in "what links here".
>>
>> That would be wonderful. It might even get me to create a bugzilla
>> account to vote for a bug if there is one open on this...(of course,
>> one problem is still that some templates are relevant to article
>> content and some are not - the ones that generate distracting links
>> are the navigational ones that tend to be at the bottom of pages, the
>> footer templates - and I'm not sure if infobox links would count as
>> template links or not - they are generated from parsing of a template
>> parameter, but don't appear in the template itself, unlike the footer
>> navboxes).
>>
>> [In case anyone is confused, an example is the massive footer
>> templates that can lead to Nobel prize winners decades apart linking
>> to each other, or diverse topics within a broad area linking to each
>> other, though only through templates and not in the text. Oh, and some
>> links appear in both footer templates, infoboxes, and the article
>> 'text'. Not sure how that is handled.]
>>
>> Carcharoth
>>
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> --
> David Goodman
>
> DGG at the enWP
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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