Last modified: 2005-06-19 12:56:16 UTC

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Bug 2409 - Special page to display what other pages "transclude" a given page/template
Special page to display what other pages "transclude" a given page/template
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1065
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Templates (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal enhancement with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2005-06-14 13:41 UTC by lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט
Modified: 2005-06-19 12:56 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-06-14 13:41:14 UTC
Hallo!

After some thousand edits at different test wiki's I experienced the need to
identify pages where a special template (or page) is included.

Neither [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:foo]] nor
[[Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:foo]] provides this information.

The toolbox item would be extremly helpful to provide a workaround / to overcome
some / many of the reported bugs.
See: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2098#c3
at bug 2098: "action=purge and categories - implement a more effectiv
action=update or action=rebuild"


It could be implemented in showing

a) inclusions in other templates
   no "restrictions"

b) inclusions in other pages
   At bug 2307: "atribute OVERHEAD for each page;" I tried to forsee what would
happen with a "Special:Whatincludesthis" and some templates required to build
another one. To continue the OVERHEAD idea the main benefit would be / have been
to be able to filter these templates out and to show them if a the appropriate
checkox is activated.

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
Comment 1 Rowan Collins [IMSoP] 2005-06-14 19:34:29 UTC
Am I right in thinking that what you are actually requesting here is a page
which shows what *includes* a [Template] page, rather than what *links to* it?
Effectively, some kind of "Special:Whatincludesthis" page, or a switch on
Special:Whatlinkshere.

The main problem at the moment (and the reason that Special:Whatlinkshere
currently shows these inclusions as well as normal links) is that these aren't
distinguished in the database; that is bug 1065, and until that is fixed, there
is no way of implementing such a tool. Once the database stores the difference
appropriately, it will become a pretty obvious (and simple) step to make the
tool, since inclusions will no longer show up on the existing
Special:Whatlinkshere display.

If I'm right in this interpretation, however:
* what does your "OVERHEAD attribute" have to do with this?
* what is the provided URL intended to demonstrate?
Comment 2 lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-06-15 04:02:40 UTC
in response to comment 1
> If I'm right in this interpretation, however:
> * what does your "OVERHEAD attribute" have to do with this?
> * what is the provided URL intended to demonstrate?

Hi Rowan!

A better example we can look *now* to understand "OVERHEAD attribute" would be
looking for "Templates used on this page:" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Patrick&action=edit
http://test.leuksman.com/index.php?title=Bugzilla_2307&action=edit
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/mediawiki15c/index.php?title=Bugzilla_2307&action=edit

I wonder why the lasts are so short and to what level nested templates are
processed for that list. Please compare with the included temlates at
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/golem/Yiddish where I decided to make only
"template inclusions".

Special:Whatincludesthis would be "the other way around". Instead of displaying
a large amout of overhead templates / pages only *the relevant* would be displayed.

b) The "Template:TOC_etc" from the URL is a template I used quite often 70 - 100
times (see Special:Contributions. I wondered why the
"Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:TOC_etc" was showing only two pages.

Regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
Comment 3 Rowan Collins [IMSoP] 2005-06-16 13:39:51 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
 
> Special:Whatincludesthis would be "the other way around". Instead of displaying
> a large amout of overhead templates / pages only *the relevant* would be
displayed.

This rather begs the question "relevant for what/whom?" I think the main problem
with an overhead attribute is that it over-simplifies this kind of thing - in
different contexts, *different* things are "overhead". It seems more sensible to
use existing information to filter on, such as namespaces - e.g. if you don't
want to see Templates, hide things in the Template namespace. If the choice of
18 or so namespaces (and the ability to create new ones) doesn't offer a precise
enough way of separating these things, how is a choice of 2 states ("overhead"
versus "not overhead") going to help? 

> I wonder why the lasts are so short and to what level nested templates are
> processed for that list. 
[...]
> b) The "Template:TOC_etc" from the URL is a template I used quite often 70 - 100
> times (see Special:Contributions. I wondered why the
> "Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:TOC_etc" was showing only two pages.

That appears to be some kind of bug, unrelated to this discussion - for some
reason Template:TOC_etc and others aren't showing up properly in the "What links
here" and "Templates used on this page" lists, presumably because they're not
being entered in the link table properly. This is rather worrying, and should
probably be investigated.
Comment 4 lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-06-17 00:56:40 UTC
in response to comment 3
> "relevant for what/whom?"

Wikis live through communities. Decisions and policies should be made together.

Only a community can say if it wants to see (*by default*) *all* the included
templates at
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/mediawikirtl/index.php?title=%D7%99%D7%99%D6%B4%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A9_-_Yiddish&action=edit
(sorry bugzilla will probably break this link) or not.

In the next version of Temlate:Task inclusions will be made *only* trough
templates. This means that
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/mediawiki15c/index.php?title=Betawiki:Templates/Template:Task&action=edit
 would show about five time the number of templates as displayed now. My
question is: Is this informative or not? Again only the community can answer this.


Please look also at
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/betawiki/Kuva:Special_wantedpages_01.jpg
where many "backlinks" to "foo/stealth lonks" where used. I heared that [[de:]]
used them for a long time and there might be good reasons for that.
Example: Some months ago I compared [[eo:Special:Whatlinkshere/Lingvo]]
(language) with the list(s) of languages in order to add all to a new category
language. Many of the relevant articles did not contain this word so wikifying
without adding new content / sentences was not a simple task. My personal
opinion is that stealth links can help, also in "stubs" at emerging wikis.
What I want to say is that there are many methods to find a page but often you
need to make more the one attempt. Newbies would stop after the first
unsuccessful attempt.

Again the questions is "what is reasonable" and the answer is not simple. After
7.000 edits at the test wikis I saw that not all sitiations can be handled the
same way. There might be a recommend way do do "what was done until doday" in
80%-90% of the edits. To do somthing *new* implicates by definition
modifications. That is darvinism and evolution. But that is philosophy.

Regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
Comment 5 Rowan Collins [IMSoP] 2005-06-17 13:07:06 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> in response to comment 3
> > "relevant for what/whom?"
> 
> Wikis live through communities. Decisions and policies should be made together.

Fair enough; I guess my concern was that a simple "yes or no" attribute would
not be flexible enough to reflect the different kinds of filtering that might be
useful - which would tend to vary depending what task the user was carrying out,
rather than following any fixed pattern.
 
> Only a community can say if it wants to see (*by default*) *all* the included
> templates at
>
http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/mediawikirtl/index.php?title=%D7%99%D7%99%D6%B4%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A9_-_Yiddish&action=edit

It looks to me like most of the "templates used" in that example are actually
only linked to (the database can't tell the difference), but I take your point
(and your next example is more to the point) - it might be useful to filter
those lists somehow. Although it would seem to me that basically *all* templates
are "overhead"? The purpose of the "templates used in this page" list is, quite
simply, to provide clickable links to bits of content that show up on the page
but aren't directly edittable; it's a convenience thing, and also reduces the
confusion new editors have that they don't know what to edit. It seems to me
that hiding some of them again would reintroduce that very confusion; better
layout than a list when there are lots would certainly look less ugly, though! :)

> Please look also at
> http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/betawiki/Kuva:Special_wantedpages_01.jpg
> where many "backlinks" to "foo/stealth lonks" where used. I heared that [[de:]]
> used them for a long time and there might be good reasons for that.

I don't understand why you'd ever want to do this; if you want something to link
to a page, why would you link instead to another page with a similar but
different name? And if you want to add links purely for the purpose of looking
up their backlinks, that's what [[Category: links are for, surely? Then you
don't need a special "stealth links"/"overhead" marker, because they're all
neatly contained in the Category namespace. (As for them not showing up in
Wantedpages - just create them! Create them blank - or, more logically, as a
redirect to the thing they're supposedly "stealth links" for.)

> Example: Some months ago I compared [[eo:Special:Whatlinkshere/Lingvo]]
> (language) with the list(s) of languages in order to add all to a new category
> language. Many of the relevant articles did not contain this word so wikifying
> without adding new content / sentences was not a simple task. 

What was wrong with just adding the category tag? Isn't that the whole point of
categories? And if a page doesn't mention a particular word then it *shouldn't*
show up on the Whatlinkshere list; and the other way around, too: if the article
is improved by a link to the term, then it should mention that term.

> Newbies would stop after the first unsuccessful attempt.

I'm lost; are we still talking about "stealth links" here? How do they help
anyone find anything? "What links here" is never going to be a reliable way of
finding related articles, except in a kind of "browsing randomly" kind of a way.
For logical organisation of related topics, we have built-in category support.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole point. Can you give a simple summary of
what "stealth links" are, and what problem they are intended to solve? [We're
well off the topic of this bug, but never mind]
Comment 6 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 2005-06-17 13:17:11 UTC
This bug (and others) could be easily solved by modifying the link table to
include what kind of links exists, as well as from what page.
Comment 7 Rowan Collins [IMSoP] 2005-06-17 13:27:19 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> This bug (and others) could be easily solved by modifying the link table to
> include what kind of links exists, as well as from what page.

*nods* hence marked dependency on bug 1065
Comment 8 Brion Vibber 2005-06-17 19:19:44 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1065 ***
Comment 9 lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-06-19 12:56:16 UTC
explaining open item from comment 2 at
bug 2456: "Templates used on this page:" is not updated (properly) while a page
is changed
refers here

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