[WikiEN-l] Most wanted

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske
>> <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> 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