[WikiEN-l] List of Rivers of Egpyt - what to do?

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:05 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:29 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I also thought there was a template for lists of rivers, but the
>> template at the bottom of that page is generated by a template
>> parameter from Template:Africa topic
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Africa_topic) so there is no
>> way to actually link to the template as it displays in the article.
>> Which is more than a bit annoying.
>
> Yeah, that caught me by surprise, too. It's a nice way of sort of
> instantly generating hundreds of templates. And there's nothing
> stopping someone making {{List of rivers of Africa}} with the content
> {{Africa topic|List of rivers of}}.
>
> Is it worth asking the developers for the ability to link to a
> template with parameters? If nothing else it might be useful for
> previewing etc.

If you do get a developer to do that, can you also ask for the "what
links here" thing to distingush between links provided by template
content and links provided by article content (i.e. non-template
content)? Preferably with a link to the template providing the link?
It used to be the case that "what links here" was a handy way of
checking all the links you had made within an article (a good way to
check overlinking and underlinking), but in articles where massive
footer topic templates are present, you can get literally hundreds of
links coming purely from the templates alone and sometimes only 30 or
so from the actual article.

Carcharoth