On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 8:42 AM, Nicolas Vervelle <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I find that the result of list=backlinks for page XXX is odd when one of
> the backlinks is a redirect on a different page than XXX, but has also
> contents with a link to XXX.
>
> See for example backlinks to en:Spin-off
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?bltitle=Spin-off&continue=&action=query&blredirect=&list=backlinks&format=xml&bllimit=max
>
> Among the backlinks, there's for example "User talk:SummerPhD" and all
> pages linking to this talk page :
>
>    - It's content contains a link to Spin-off page, so it's normal to see
>    it.
>    - It's also a redirect (bad practice to have a redirect page with
>    contents), so all backlinks to this talk page are also listed while they
>    have no relation at all to "Spin-off"
>
> Is it normal to have this behaviour ?
>
This is the documented behavior: the description of the blredirect
parameter[1] says "If linking page is a redirect, find all pages that link
to that redirect as well." [[Spin-off]] is indeed linked from [[User
talk:SummerPhD]], and [[User talk:SummerPhD]] is indeed a redirect.

If you're looking for actual redirects to [[Spin-off]] rather than all
redirect pages that link to [[Spin-off]], you want to use prop=redirects[2]
instead. You might also consider using prop=linkshere[3] instead of
list=backlinks, as the former allows you to specify multiple titles at the
cost of not having a "blredirect"-style subquery.

 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?modules=query+backlinks
 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?modules=query+redirects
 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?modules=query+linkshere


-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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