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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Miscellaneous/Check if a page exists without populating WhatLinksHere

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Check if a page exists without populating WhatLinksHere

  • Problem: Does a wiki page exist? You would expect that this would be a simple thing to check, and it partly is - you can use the #ifexist parser function. However, this has unexpected consequences: the wiki page that does this check will now appear in Special:WhatLinksHere. These false flags causes problems for editors that are working on resolving misplaced wikilinks, such as links to redirects or disambiguation pages. That in turn leads to them objecting to templates that check for the existence of a page to see if they should link to it.
  • Who would benefit: Template developers and editors resolving disambiguation links on all wikis
  • Proposed solution: Stop checks for the existence of a page from appearing at WhatLinksHere
  • More comments: This was included in the 2015, 2017, and 2019 community wishlists: while it only had 1 oppose vote, it did not get enough support votes to be addressed. It is tricky to resolve, but it should be fixed.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T14019 (started on 18 November 2007 - happy 13th birthday!), this is part of the larger task described at phab:T268526 ("Use a dedicated mechanism to track page dependencies")
  • Proposer: Mike Peel (talk) 22:14, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I do not know how important this is, but I'll support since it keeps getting asked over and over again apparently. Hopefully, that gets implemented. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 22:37, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've supported this fix every year. I hope the 13th is the lucky one ;-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:35, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@MarioSuperstar77, Certes, Evad37, Kaybeesquared, Arlo Barnes, Urhixidur, Putnik, Paul1764, Paul1764, Charitwo, Huji, Jack who built the house, Rodw, Pigsonthewing, Wbm1058, Czar, Andyrom75, Matthiaspaul, The wub, SMcCandlish, Beta16, מושך בשבט, Shalomori123, Do2or, Nahum, Shahar9261, אחיה יאיר וודקה, Roxette5, Draceane, Dovi, Atamari, Man77, Teratix, נריה קלר, SebastianHelm, GiFontenelle, Kku, He3nry, Golmore, Uanfala, Amire80, and Pashute: If you're still interested in this issue, please see Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Check if a page exists without populating WhatLinksHere. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:16, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting