7 Components: the Function Pages - Developers

have the opportunity to see to what degree and in what areas an article
is integrated in the wiki. If deficits become apparent, remedies
may be able to be found.
When employed appropriately, backlinks are a good source of information.
Backlinks to a user page list all pages in which the corresponding
user has made signed contributions. Since this is particularly
common practice for discussions, one can find discussion contributions
made by a participant. Templates issuing certain messages
function in a similar manner. For example, if you have a template
that identifies a page as “urgently requiring editing,” you can use
backlinks to find all articles carrying this predicate. Similarly, you
can establish your own category system using this mechanism, with
which you can set a link on the category page for every article belonging
to a certain main category. The pages of this group can then
be discovered via the What links here function. Of course, this is superfluous
in MediaWiki, because categorization is possible. However,
there are several wikis that have no categorizing function. Yet
backlinks are a component of just about every piece of wiki software.
The page Special:Recentchangeslinked displays changes made in
the last seven days to pages that have been linked by a particular
page. The use of this special page corresponds to that of Recent
changes.
Recent changes linked displays pages that have been linked from
a single page. If you want to be absolutely certain that the list is
complete, you should make sure the watch period you select is long
enough. One advantage is that the integrated templates are displayed
and linked. They can be found and edited more easily than if you
first switch to edit mode and then painstakingly search for places
that integrate the templates.
Establishing a watch page is very similar. You create a page that
links to all articles whose development you wish to follow. Via Recent
changes linked, you can now obtain a list of all edits to those
particular pages.
If you are logged in, you will find a further special page in the
navigation area: Upload file. This was discussed in detail in Chapter
6.3.
Under the link SpecialPages, you will find further navigation
functions in the namespace Main. They can be divided into two
groups. The first serves to make interested readers aware of certain
articles or facilitate their access to them. This group includes:
� All pages. This contains a complete list in table form of all
pages in the main namespace of the wiki. Here, you can enter a
Backlinks
for page
organization
Recent changes
linked
Use as a
watch page
Upload file
Navigation
pages for
readers
7.1 Navigation �
�
�
105