Linkage bloat - WikiEN-l

4 Apr 2011

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 &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; 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 &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:
  On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling
&lt;tstarling(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
  On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote:
  On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske
 &lt;magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com&gt; 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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