On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 4:30 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's an interesting question. Is there any way for
> Special:WhatLinksHere to distinguish between links from a template
> rather than links from the actual article text? I presume at present
> it all just goes into a links table generated on save, and can't be
> distinguished ...
>
Long story short, there's no good way to distinguish them due to combination
of 1) it's hard to define the actual problem domain and 2) the links tables
as they are today are not rich enough to distinguish the various cases after
the fact.
It's not very clear what "links from a template" mean, exactly; there are
several possibilities:
* the literal text [[Foobar]] appears in template code that gets expanded
into the calling page, but does not appear in the calling page's source
* the literal text [[Foobar]] appears in a template parameter passed from
the calling page to the template, which then expands it into the calling
page's own context. It would not become a link unless the template were
there, but the entire link appears in the calling page's source (example:
anything linked in freetext parameters to a citation or infobox template)
* the template constructs a link with some parameter, say
[[{{{something}}}]] which creates a link [[Foobar]] that exists by itself in
neither the calling page nor the template, but whose target is provided by
the calling page (example: lots and lots of infoboxes and such)
* the template constructs a link with some parameter, say
[[Wikipedia:List_of_requests/{{{something}}}]] which creates a link that
exists by itself in neither the calling page nor the template, but whose
target is influenced in some way by the calling page (example: lots of
helper templates for discussion chunks)
* the template constructs a link with some other piece of information,
perhaps a parser function, that can't clearly be traced from the calling
page (though it might be related to the calling page, such as pulling its
page name.)
See also old notes on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5388
I get the impression that the most desired case is to help humans to
identify the simplest case at the top of the list: literal links that appear
in the template's freeform body text as included at template expansion time.
The pagelinks table doesn't store the needed information; even looking for
literal links from an existing template page, what you'll actually see
recorded is what appears in the template page parsed as its *own* page,
which might be a big giant documentation page done with <includeonly> and
friends. You may also legitimately have links that appear in both the
calling page's body *and* in the template, and probably wouldn't want to
filter those out.
More information would need to be saved from the parser into the link
tables... it may, or may not, be possible in the present parser system to
distinguish some of these cases when actually finding links and expanding
things, and then find some way to record in the links tables what source(s)
the link came from.
-- brion
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