On 19/05/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Would it be difficult to arrange matters so that the
Whatlinkshere page
showed indirect links through a transcluded template in similar fashion to
those through a REDIRECT page?
Yes, to put it simply, it would be very difficult.
AFAIK, the contents of a template are added to the containing page
*before* things like links are calculated, so that there's no way of
knowing whether a link was entered directly, or through a template.
e.g. if [[Template:B]] contains "[[C]]", a page containing "{{B}}"
will have exactly the same links recorded in the database as one
containing "{{B}} [[C]]"; thus the whatlinkshere display for [[C]]
would have no way of knowing which was the case.
This is hard to avoid, unless the template system is altered to
"parse" the fragment of wikitext in the template and insert it
ready-made - a move likely to be controversial with those using
templates, for instance, as fragments of a table.
There are currently also issues to do with the way template links are
represented and handled in the database (see
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/1065 and the bugs it blocks), which
among other things mean that editting a template doesn't update the
"inherited" links (bug 939). A way of determining and representing the
"inherited" status of those links would be an alternative solution to
that one, I guess, but I'm not sure how it would work.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]