It's been oft complained that it's difficult to link to various special functions -- backlinks, contribs, and the like -- which might be nice. I made a quick hack to allow tacking a parameter onto a special page in a wikilink, like so:

[[Special:Contributions/User name]]

[[Special:Whatlinkshere/Page title]]

[[Special:Recentchangeslinked/Page title]]

etc

See some examples and try it out at on the test wiki at http://test.wikipedia.org/

The slash (/) doesn't have to be the separator character; if people find it offensive I'm sure we could change it to something else. :) A(nother) colon may or may not be preferable.

An advantage that a variant on this scheme has over the experimental interwiki prefixes Erik put in a bit ago ([[BackLinks:foo]] etc) is that it will require no additional per-wiki maintenance, and can be used across existing interwiki links (once set up on the live wikis), eg: [[DeWikipedia:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]] would work from English Wikipedia, or even from other unrelated wikis so long as they support the DeWikipedia prefix.*

A disadvantage (so far) is that since history & editing don't go through special pages, they'll need a little more work to set up on a similar scheme.

(Technical notes please follow up to wikitech-l. Policy & usability notes please follow up to wikipedia-l.)

*On a somewhat related note, it may be useful to set up a redirector such that other wikis don't have to set up a billion separate interwiki prefixes to link to Wikipedia. eg, a link to: [[WikiPedia:pl:Medycyna]]

would typically end up at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/pl:Medycyna

That could never be an article on English wikipedia, since internal links would take the pl: to be an interlanguage prefix, and it's rejected as a bad title. So why not redirect? So, to reiterate our example with this possibility we might link: [[WikiPedia:de:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]]

on any wiki supporting the WikiPedia interwiki prefix, with no need to bug site owners to extend their prefix list for other languages. Too many pieces? Maybe. :) But probably easier to type than

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Spezial:Contribtutions&target...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)