[WikiEN-l] Most wanted

[David Goodman]

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
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>



-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG