Help:What links here
Every page has a link labelled "What links here".
Contents
Overview
The What links here facility can be used to see which other articles contain links to one you are interested in. To see this information, choose the what links here link while looking at any page. A list of articles which links to the specified page are displayed chronologically, from old at the top to most recently linked at the bottom.
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.
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.
To invoke a what links here list directly, use e.g.
[[Special:Whatlinkshere/John Smith]]
resulting in Special:Whatlinkshere/John_Smith.
Limitation
Not listed are subpages that just have an automatic link to a page.
Redirects
The backlinks feature shows which backlinks are redirects.
The backlinks of the redirect are also shown, and if they include a redirect, the backlinks of that also (not more).
This makes it a useful tool for finding double redirects, which do not work, and, except in special applications (see below) can better be replaced by redirects to the final target.
Order
When the link tables in the database are rebuilt, the lists are alphabetically ordered. However, adding a link subsequently causes it to be added to the end, and thus these occur in chronological order.
