[WikiEN-l] Linkage bloat

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> On 8 November 2011 15:32, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> What I'm looking for is the ability to filter links to articles that
>> are due to that template being transcluded on other pages, and links
>> that actually come from the non-transcluded areas of articles.
>> Preferably with the links from transclusions annotated with the name
>> of the transcluded item generating the link.
>
> I was going to suggest filing a bug, but it seems the problem's been
> in bugzilla for six years:
>
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241
>
> Judging by the comments there, it looks like it's technically quite
> difficult to do.
>
> Back to the drawing board... fixing whatlinkshere apparently won't
> work, and limiting the templates (by removing links or obfuscating
> them with redirects) will cause more problems than this one solves, so
> what's the third option? Can something be scripted on the toolserver
> as a stand-in?

Thanks for the link to that. That is not the bugzilla discussion I saw
previously, though maybe the discussion I am remembering was on
wiki-tech-l. I think it was, but there was also discussion in another
wiki-en-l thread about the same time (February 2011). See what Tim
Starling says here (on wiki-en-l):

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-February/108486.html

The wiki-tech-l discussion had this comment from Brion Vibber:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-February/051647.html

Given that both Tim and Brion had commented and nothing got done, I
sort of gave up at that point.

Carcharoth