Kerry Raymond, 14/06/2017 00:45:
What is motivating this is because I often find that "what links here" often points to some surprising articles which can reveal new insights into a topic.
Indeed. I always teach the "what links here" feature at all my wiki courses.
Kerry Raymond, 14/06/2017 03:08:
I try to suppress the transclusions (usually coming from navboxes) but they are still displayed no matter whether I say to “Show/Hide Transclusions” but a search of the article reveals there is no other link present.
Hiding transclusions means to hide the "links" in the form {{:Bang Bang Jump Up}}, not the links within templates. There is currently no distinction in the database for "templated" links (they all go https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pagelinks_table ).
I think ElasticSearch/CirrusSearch currently can tell the difference, for ranking purposes, and could maybe expose it somewhere. Which makes sense, because overlinking is a problem specific to some wikis (other wikis have even forbidden the navigational templates that are so prevalent on the English Wikipedia), and while several HTML classes have been defined across the years (some now listed at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/IDs_and_classes#Content ), only "noprint" is standard/stable.
Nemo