Last modified: 2012-12-12 13:58:01 UTC
It would be helpful if special:linksearch at least optionally mentioned who created the links. Example: see links to someidiot.com in several articles, suspect a spam campaign. Linksearch shows there are 100's of links to that domain. You now have to click dozens of them to get a sense of how many users they're coming from. Showing the usernames (and maybe being able to sort on them) would make this process easier.
We don't track that information in the same place that we pull link information from, so that isn't an option at present.
There's no good way to track this; URLs aren't necessarily added to an article by a user at all; they may be brought in via a template dependency (or even a changing variable!)
Not to mention the issue with re-adding URLs while reverting vandalism.
Hmm, I'll think about this some more, there may still be some way. I'm not too worried about occasional false hits from vandal reversion--the idea is to find when someone has inserted the same link 100 times. Links in templates should be treated just like links in articles. Maybe this can be done with some external tool that crunches the link table against the article histories, instead of as a linksearch enhancement. I'll see if I can figure out specifics.
[Removing RESOLVED LATER as discussed in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064240.html and setting WONTFIX as per comments 1 to 3.
