High time we left these off the whatlinkshere page, if technically feasible. It would be the first step towards presenting the page in a usable fashion, such as alphabetically.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Carcharoth<[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
