[Wikipedia-l] Enhanced special page links (in testing)

[Brion Vibber]

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=Eloquence

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)