Help:What links here

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Special pages – Help

In the toolbox of every page there is a link labeled "What links here" (or, more generally, labeled with the text in MediaWiki:Whatlinkshere), also called backlink.

Overview

The What links here facility lists the pages on the same site which link to a given page, either the pages in all namespaces, or in a specified one. To see this information, choose the What links here link while looking at any page. The pages linking to and/or embedding the given page are listed. The list is sorted by namespace then page ID (i.e., by date of creation of the page).^[1]

This info comes from the pagelinks table and the templatelinks table. The pages embedding the given page are marked with the content of MediaWiki:Istemplate ("transclusion" or "inclusion"); for these pages it is not shown whether they also link to the given page. This can be seen with m:Query#backlinks.

The list of links to an article is useful in a number of ways:

It gives a very rough indication of how popular a page is. Pages with many links are likely to be viewed often and should therefore be of the very best quality. Pages with few or no links may not be very popular.
Where the subject material of an article is unclear, the list of articles linking to it might provide useful context. For instance when presented with a stub about John Smith that gives only his date of birth and death, viewing the list of links to the article might reveal that he won a gold medal in the Olympics.
Facilitates proper disambiguation.

This facility works also for a page that does not exist (there may be links to it, which makes it extra useful to create it). The What links here button is also on the edit page on which one arrives when following a broken link. Thus, for example, if film articles are linked to the actors, one can find the films an actor has played in even if there is no article about the actor.

To invoke a What links here list directly, use e.g.

[[w:Special:Whatlinkshere/John Smith|w:Special:Whatlinkshere/John Smith]]

resulting in w:Special:Whatlinkshere/John_Smith.

Limitations and workarounds

Not listed are:

[1]