Now that I've made a Free-Space Profile, what useful things can I do with it?

Question

I made a Free-Space Profile of a place that's of interest in my family tree.  Now I'm wondering how I can take advantage of it.  For sure, when this place is mentioned in the biography of a family member I can encode it as an internal link, and I suppose that's a bit cool-ish.  But I was hoping that the Free-Space Profile Page would, for example, give me an easy way of seeing every Profile which links to it in some way.  Maybe there are some other useful - or just interesting - things I could do with it?

Answer 1

 Putting

 [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Space:Edge_End]] 

on the page will create a link to a page that shows you all profiles that link to your freespace page. You could also use categories for a similar purpose. 

People use freespace pages for all sorts of things, like:

• Organizing projects
• Providing lengthy family histories that cover multiple profiles
• Describe everything about a source, linking to it online, giving errata, and providing easy copy-and-paste citations
• Disambiguating multiple similar people, or untangling a conflated person
• Transcribing lengthy records

Comments

I learn something new each time I visit this forum!  haha Thank you!

Answer 2

If it is a "place", or city; perhaps having categorists create a category for the city.  This way you place each person you find within this category (and use the category like an index.)  However, this also means anyone else with an ancestor or profile in that locale can also place a person in that category.

Answer 3

Free-space pages are mainly for documentation. You have the right idea of adding a link to it from profiles, but they were never really meant to do very much more than that.

There are a few tricks you can use, such as getting to the "What Links Here" function which I think is what you are looking for... 

Comments

Thanks Steve, and also [[Smith-116348|Barry Smith]] who provided the syntax.

It would be real nice if the resulting page gave you more than just the ID code of the person with the link.  For example, on my Free-Space Page I can see this feature ending up resulting in a long list of people, all referred to as Brook-xxxx, and me having no real clue as to which particular Brook each one is!

Still, I have to say, it's better than nothing!

It seems to me it would be pretty useful universally if this functionality were to be built in to the basic structure of the page by default.

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In short, what you are looking for is Categorization. The "What Links Here" function is typically used for other operations, and it is unlikely that it would be modified to provide any additional information.

However, with a category, you could see the information you are looking to find. I don't think Edge End would qualify for a public category at this time, but you could easily use a personal category for the profiles.