Last modified: 2014-04-20 19:34:30 UTC
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_film_noir_titles&oldid=602345967#References One of the footnotes is used 500+ times on that page. The backlinks are flooding the References section. It is pointless to display them when the link is used more than, say, five times. Please implement either default suppression for highly-used footnotes or alternatively add an attribute for the tag like uselinkmany="no" or "maxdisplaylinkmany=5".
I commented a couple of times elsewhere that as a practical matter the backlinks are useless -- no user (well, maybe one in a thousand) is going to know which of the hundreds (or even tens, or even three or four) backlinks to click. To me, it'd be better to let the browser's facility for going back to the previous page handle this and just display a single clickable <sup>^</sup> symbol -- that'd likely require changes elsewhere to make this facility available to Mediawiki extensions, though (it's been a long time since I looked at internals re this and I've forgotten), and it might raise security issues (though I can't think of any offhand). Personally, I never try to figure out which backlink to click -- I use the browser's "back" button. ~~~~
This appears to be a duplicate of https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23455 There is a template available which appears to be a workaround for this problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Listref I would disagree that the back-links are useless. I use them regularly when working on fixing references, or checking on reference validity. However, I do agree that they could be much more useful than they are currently and that a huge number of back-links is impractical. Perhaps a solution would be to move the back-links to the end of the reference (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31910), or into tooltips?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 23455 ***
