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@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@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote:
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@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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