Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/WhatLinksHere through summaries

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Clarification

Hey @Nardog - thanks for sharing this wish. After reviewing it, I'm not sure what the problem is that you're trying to solve, and how it could impact editor workflows. Can you please re-articulate the core problem? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 15:09, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

I tried but I can't make it clearer. What do you not understand? Nardog (talk) 04:44, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Questions

Hi @Nardog - I'm just looking to understand this a bit more and get a sense of the potential impact of doing this work. Have you read the concerns at T137762 about edit summaries not being editable? Does that impact your desire for this change at all?

Second, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more on what decisions you're trying to make with this information. You noted you want to know "how useful" a redirect is, so is the context for this decision deleting a redirect, or something else? Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

The primary use case is deciding what to do to a redirect; that doesn't necessarily mean it's up for deletion, it might be for retargeting etc. For example, WP:SME was retargeted from Wikipedia:Super Mario effect to Wikipedia:Expert editors because WhatLinksHere showed people who linked to it actually meant the latter. But we don't know if that's accurate because we can't see how many people linked to it in summaries and if so which page they meant. (I guess we can if you run an SQL query, but I shudder to imagine how long it'd take.)

I've seen the concerns on Phab, and they don't affect my wish. Spitballing, I can think of several ways to mitigate the potential risks:

• not showing the results if the number is under a certain threshold, much like the number of watchers on action=info
• not showing the results if the page doesn't exist
• showing only the total number of linking summaries and not the summaries/edits themselves (less desirable as it wouldn't help the example above, but it can be combined with the first bullet, i.e. showing the summaries only if there are enough of them)
• allowing users to suppress a summary within (say) 5 minutes after it was published (but not to modify it, which would open a whole can of worms)

But I'm also having a hard time imagining what "bad links" or "bad entries" would be. What kind of summary is fine on page history, user contributions, etc. but not on a WhatLinksHere-type list?! Nardog (talk) 00:00, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

@Nardog Out of interest I tried a naive Superset query (for a popular policy page, which probably impacted things) and gave up after 8 minutes, so it seems you're right about that not being a useful approach :) Thanks for explaining all this - I've updated T137762 to be a bit more specific. How do you think this could be displayed in WhatLinksHere? My initial feeling is that edit summary links should be distinguished in some way from 'normal' page links. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:31, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd say much like Special:RecentChangesLinked or Special:AbuseFilter/examine. Nardog (talk) 11:28, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't see much of a use-case / usefulness with enabling contributors to see which edit summaries link to a page; usually it's redundant because after that edit the page itself links to the page and it would probably be difficult to implement without any actual use. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:12, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

What do you mean by after that edit the page itself links to the page? Nardog (talk) 22:06, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

I meant that usually if a page is wikilinked in an edit summary it's been added to the edited page so the edited page will then show up in whatlinkshere. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:08, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Which is not true. We link to (shortcuts to) policy/guideline/help pages in summaries all the time, which are prohibited in article body. Nardog (talk) 11:26, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

I just wrote usually, so there can still be thousands of cases where this isn't the case. Maybe it's the case in 20% of wikilinking or I'm wrong but why would it be useful to see which edits have linked to some meta pages in practical real-world terms. I think it may be neat but my point is that the usefulness just isn't there or at least it hasn't been made not clear and I doubt there is much of it. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:52, 18 November 2024 (UTC)