[WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance

[David Goodman]

High time we left these off the whatlinkshere page, if technically
feasible. It would be the first step towards presenting the page in a
usable fashion, such as alphabetically.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Emily Monroe<bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>>> The navboxes would be so much better if they didn't pollute "what
>>> links here".
>>
>> I personally like navboxes.
>>
>> I usually use "what links here" to check if an article is orphaned or
>> not. What do you use it for?
>
> To see what other articles an article is linked from (i.e. mentioned
> in). It can help when looking through such a list to think "why is
> this article linked from this one?" You may be wondering why the Nobel
> Prize winner in 2000 (for example) is linked from the page of the
> winner in 1976. Then you realise it is because the 2000 prize winner
> is linked from the navbox on the 1976 winner's page, and is not
> mentioned in the article text for the 1976 winner.
>
> In other words, I like using "what links here" to find out when
> something is mentioned in the article *text*, rather than when it is
> merely mentioned in a navbox template. One of the problems though is
> that links from an *infobox* are more relevant, so I would want those
> to be in "what links here", so cutting out templates altogether is not
> good. But being able to *filter out* the "links from transcluded
> templates" (and also list which templates they are coming from) would
> be the ideal solution.
>
> Let me find an article without a navbox, and with a nice "what links
> here" list, to show what I mean.
>
> OK, I picked the current featured article (which I should warn might
> shock some):
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Rosewood+massacre&namespace=0
>
> Limited the list to articlespace.
>
> All those are (at first glance) relevant links.
>
> But if you do the same for Ahmed Zewail, first limit to template namespace:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Ahmed+Zewail&namespace=10
>
> You see he is linked from three navbox templates.
>
> Now look at the links from article space:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Ahmed_Zewail&namespace=0&limit=250
>
> Lots and lots of people listed there. Who are they? Maybe people he
> has worked with? Maybe people he is related to, or otherwise has a
> reason to be linked to from, or mentioned in their articles? But no.
> Most of them are links only because he appears in a template at the
> bottom of their page, and they both won the same award, sometime years
> apart.
>
> Even worse, there might be genuine links in there that could be
> followed up to find useful snippets of information not in the original
> article. Sure, you need to verify with a reliable source, but this is
> one way to build up articles, and the pollution of "what links here"
> with links from navboxes makes this useless.
>
> It can *also* obscure whether an article is orphaned.
>
> Consider the case where the *only* links in "what links here" are due
> to being in a navbox template. The article would appear to be linked
> from many articles, but it would not be linked from anywhere (or very
> few places) in *real* text in other articles.
>
> Now do you see the problem I'm getting at here?
>
> Carcharoth
>
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