It's been oft complained that it's difficult to link to various special
functions -- backlinks, contribs, and the like -- which might be nice. I
made a quick hack to allow tacking a parameter onto a special page in a
wikilink, like so:
[[Special:Contributions/User name]]
[[Special:Whatlinkshere/Page title]]
[[Special:Recentchangeslinked/Page title]]
etc
See some examples and try it out at on the test wiki at
http://test.wikipedia.org/
The slash (/) doesn't have to be the separator character; if people find
it offensive I'm sure we could change it to something else. :) A(nother)
colon may or may not be preferable.
An advantage that a variant on this scheme has over the experimental
interwiki prefixes Erik put in a bit ago ([[BackLinks:foo]] etc) is that
it will require no additional per-wiki maintenance, and can be used
across existing interwiki links (once set up on the live wikis), eg:
[[DeWikipedia:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]] would work from English
Wikipedia, or even from other unrelated wikis so long as they support
the DeWikipedia prefix.*
A disadvantage (so far) is that since history & editing don't go through
special pages, they'll need a little more work to set up on a similar
scheme.
(Technical notes please follow up to wikitech-l. Policy & usability
notes please follow up to wikipedia-l.)
*On a somewhat related note, it may be useful to set up a redirector
such that other wikis don't have to set up a billion separate interwiki
prefixes to link to Wikipedia. eg, a link to:
[[WikiPedia:pl:Medycyna]]
would typically end up at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/pl:Medycyna
That could never be an article on English wikipedia, since internal
links would take the pl: to be an interlanguage prefix, and it's
rejected as a bad title. So why not redirect? So, to reiterate our
example with this possibility we might link:
[[WikiPedia:de:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]]
on any wiki supporting the WikiPedia interwiki prefix, with no need to
bug site owners to extend their prefix list for other languages. Too
many pieces? Maybe. :) But probably easier to type than
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Spezial:Contribtutions&targe…
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)