Last modified: 2014-11-04 13:30:02 UTC
Most of the special pages are regularly linkable, thus it would be useful to see where are they linked from, so adding "What links here" item in toolbox menu would be practical.
Namespace fields in the database are currently unsigned, so they can't contain the value -1 for special pages. This was presumably intentional, so that they could never be stored in the database, but it turns out to be a pretty stupid idea. This could be worked around by either 1) assigning some magical value like 1000001 to special pages for database storage and making sure no one else uses it for anything, or 2) changing all the namespace fields to signed (and while we're at it, we could make them smallint and save some space). Or changing the value we use for the special namespace, I guess, but that seems like a bad idea.
Namespace fields are regular integers. (Long long ago they were unsigned tinyints, but this was long since changed.) I do see some links to special namespace in pagelinks table at present, but I'm not sure how consistently they're normalized (if they are).
Whoa, where did I get the idea that they're unsigned? Was I hallucinating or something? :( This looks very feasible, then.
see also bug 39126
*** Bug 17596 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From an internal POV, this would be really helpful :). We're trying to deprecate links to [old special page] and move them to [new special page] and having a bugger of a time identifying what those links are.
When on e.g. Special:MovePage, there should be a link to "What links here" in the sidebar. And, logically even more important, when on "What links here" itself, itself should be listed in the sidebar, just like it would otherwise. It's denying its own access path.
We already do this for content action tabs (e.g. showing "History", "Read" and "Edit"), and for user pages we show "User contributions" and "Block user" etc. when on a different special page related to a page in the user namespace. Shouldn't be too hard to fix the absence and make the other page-related tool links consistently present in the toolbar as well. This is a rather annoying user experience flaw that makes maintaining a wiki harder for sysops and harder to learn for new users as well with links "randomly" appearing and disappearing.
(In reply to Krinkle from comment #7) Just to be clear, this bug is to request that on 'Special pages associated with a wiki page' the '"What links here" in the Tools section' should point to [[Special:WhatLinksHere/<special page name>]] not to [[Special:WhatLinksHere/<page name>]], right?
