On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Emily Monroe<[email protected]> wrote: >> The navboxes would be so much better if they didn't pollute "what >> links here". > > I personally like navboxes. > > I usually use "what links here" to check if an article is orphaned or > not. What do you use it for?
To see what other articles an article is linked from (i.e. mentioned in). It can help when looking through such a list to think "why is this article linked from this one?" You may be wondering why the Nobel Prize winner in 2000 (for example) is linked from the page of the winner in 1976. Then you realise it is because the 2000 prize winner is linked from the navbox on the 1976 winner's page, and is not mentioned in the article text for the 1976 winner. In other words, I like using "what links here" to find out when something is mentioned in the article *text*, rather than when it is merely mentioned in a navbox template. One of the problems though is that links from an *infobox* are more relevant, so I would want those to be in "what links here", so cutting out templates altogether is not good. But being able to *filter out* the "links from transcluded templates" (and also list which templates they are coming from) would be the ideal solution. Let me find an article without a navbox, and with a nice "what links here" list, to show what I mean. OK, I picked the current featured article (which I should warn might shock some): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Rosewood+massacre&namespace=0 Limited the list to articlespace. All those are (at first glance) relevant links. But if you do the same for Ahmed Zewail, first limit to template namespace: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere&target=Ahmed+Zewail&namespace=10 You see he is linked from three navbox templates. Now look at the links from article space: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Ahmed_Zewail&namespace=0&limit=250 Lots and lots of people listed there. Who are they? Maybe people he has worked with? Maybe people he is related to, or otherwise has a reason to be linked to from, or mentioned in their articles? But no. Most of them are links only because he appears in a template at the bottom of their page, and they both won the same award, sometime years apart. Even worse, there might be genuine links in there that could be followed up to find useful snippets of information not in the original article. Sure, you need to verify with a reliable source, but this is one way to build up articles, and the pollution of "what links here" with links from navboxes makes this useless. It can *also* obscure whether an article is orphaned. Consider the case where the *only* links in "what links here" are due to being in a navbox template. The article would appear to be linked from many articles, but it would not be linked from anywhere (or very few places) in *real* text in other articles. Now do you see the problem I'm getting at here? Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
