Help:What links here
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This is a copy of the master help page at Meta. Do not edit this copy.
Edits will be lost in the next update from the master page. See below for more information.
Every page has a link labelled "What links here" (or, more generally, labelled with the text in mediawiki:whatlinkshere), also called backlink.
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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.
- 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.
To invoke a what links here list directly, use e.g.
[[w:Special:Whatlinkshere/John Smith]]
resulting in w: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.
See also Categories - Comparison with "What links here?"
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Wikipedia-specific help
The new feature Dynamic Page List for categories is not yet available on Wikipedia.
This page is a copy of the master help page at Meta (for general help information all Wikimedia projects can use), with two Wikipedia-specific templates inserted. To update the main text, edit the master help page for all projects at m:Help:What links here. For Wikipedia-specific issues, use Template:Ph:What links here (the extra text at the bottom of this page) or Template:Phh:What links here for a Wikipedia-specific lead (text appears at the top of this page). You are welcome to copy the exact wikitext from the master page at Meta and paste it into this page at any time. To view this page in other languages see the master page at Meta.
