They are ordered by page_id, so roughly older pages (in order of creation) will appear earlier (*it is more complicated than that, but look at the source code for details): includes/specials/SpecialWhatlinkshere.php .
There is not a record of the timestamp of when a page link relationship was added to that table(s)- have also into account that I would bet that table is filled in asynchronously, so it could pass a few seconds to a few minutes until that information is added. I guess it could be suggested as a feature, but I feel it is not the normal way contributors use it (e.g. checks move/delete a page, wrong links to a disambiguation page, etc.), but I could be very wrong.
If you want accurate information about those, you will need to analyze each page to get which edit added such link. If you just want some recent ones, I would suggest to download the list in 2 periods of times and compute the differences to detect the recently added or deleted links. You have older versions of the pagelinks/templatelinks/imagelinks tables for download on the dumps, if you cannot wait, to perform analysis.
On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 2:07 PM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2011@reagle.org wrote:
In what order are "Pages that link here" sorted? The follow doesn't seem to be by date-used or name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: WhatLinksHere/Template:Retired
I'd like to get a list of reasonable recent ones for a in-class project
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