Is there (can there be) a 'what links here?' option?

+2 votes
1.6k views
While merging dupes, I keep coming across what I believe are "true" orphan profile pages-- no parents, no spouses, no offspring, and most of the time no dates. See link below as one example.

I find such profiles an enigma, and I'm curious about them.

I'm fairly certain that wiki software has an option for displaying what links to a particular page. Can that switch be turned on over here?  When I find such profiles, I'd like to find out what links to them.

Thanks.
WikiTree profile: Sarah Rogers
in Genealogy Help by Jillaine Smith G2G6 Pilot (895k points)
I was just thinking about this! I would like that too. I assume it's turned off for privacy reasons, but maybe we can figure out a way for it to work.

By the way, it currently does work for Category, Project, etc. pages (ie. all the straight-up WikiMedia pages, not profile pages), unless this is one of those things that only I can see. Can you see this page? http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Supervisors
Oh, I just tested on my mom's account, and anyone can see that! So that's something. :)

Yes, I can see it. Took me a minute to figure out. So I tried testing it on a profile page, basically placing 

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/

before any profile page. First I tried

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Rogers-3713 and got:

There is no profile for Special:Whatlinkshere.

Tried it on a page I know has links to it and got the same thing. 

Yeah, I know. Like I said, it only works for the raw wiki pages. Not the fancied-up ones. I agree it would be nice to have for profiles. That way we could find multiple redirecting links and change them to direct links, thus decreasing the harmful effects of past bad merges.
Jillaine and Lianne, are you talking about the same practical purpose? I understand Lianne's need, to find bad redirects. I don't understand your need, Jillaine. Can you explain it more? What exactly are trying to see? Whatlinkshere would only show links from the bodies of other pages. There could be such links, especially if a profile is GEDCOM-created, but I'm not sure what you're after.
I'm trying to find out if this page is truly truly orphaned-- no connections to ANYONE. A "what links here" option would provide clues as to who this person belongs or is at least connected to, one way or another, enabling us to merge accordingly.

And if NOTHING links to them at all, is the profile page then a candidate for true deletion?

(Also wondering if wikitree has any sort of tool for finding/displaying a list of such orphans.)

1 Answer

+1 vote
Jillaine, when you say "no connections to anyone" you mean relationships, i.e. no parent-child or spouse relationships? If there were any of those, you'd see them. And they wouldn't appear in Special:Whatlinkshere. We do relationships with the database we run on top on Mediawiki.

As for deletion, the usual problems apply, e.g. the deletion of history and disappearance from surname indexes.
by Chris Whitten G2G Astronaut (1.5m points)
In the example I linked to above, there is no history to speak of. there's the initial import and the question I asked (and you answered). Nothing else.

I see no value in keeping a record like this unless something else links to it-- say from the narrative of some other page.

Why would we want such a page listed in the surname indexes?

And if you really want the system to hold on to such a page, what should we be doing with them? I'm encountering enough of them to really wonder why they're here at all, and looking for clues as to how to link them to something else.
We don't want a file like this. It clearly came from a lousy GEDCOM. We wish the user didn't import it, and if they did, we wish they would take responsibility for it. But not deleting is an important wiki principle. It's one thing if you catch it within a few days. We do deletions in those cases. After more than a year, people have seen it in indexes, Google, etc. People may have skipped creating Sarah Rogers because they saw that she already existed.

As for what to do with the profile, it's the same as any another. Merge if there's a duplicate. Improve and connect with other profiles if it's unique.
So I should just find any ol' Sarah Rogers and merge her into it so she's no longer an orphan?

Actually, I just found one way to approach this. Go to the contributors profile page (in this case, Mike Walton); look at his contributions. In this case there ARE clues. I can find a Sarah Rogers in that "ball park" to merge her with.
And in the process of all this, wondering why I feel so strongly about it. Why it bugs me so much.

The old (pre ancestry.com) version of Family Tree Maker used to have a feature called All-in-One tree, which would make a tree out of EVERY SINGLE person in your gedcom. It was a much beloved feature of FTM and its loss long bemoaned after Ancestry rewrote the software.

It was a great too also for the fact that it would help you identify loan orphan profiles in your GEDCOM because they'd show up as "islands" disconnected from the rest of the tree. I alway made a point of connecting them back in (where possible) or getting rid of them.

Sarah Rogers is an island in search of an isthmus to the mainland.

Oh dear, this burgeoning head cold is resulting in some really terrible metaphors.
Hi Jillaine,

That FTM feature sounds interesting. Something like that could be really useful. I suppose the starting point is just for us to finally add a dynamic Flash/animated version of tree browsing.

Regarding Rogers-3713, don't just merge her with any Sarah Rogers. She's a particular Sarah Rogers. She has a birth date and birth location and three sources. Looks like she has lots of duplicates too: http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:FindMatches&action=find&u=2551105

Chris
Sorry, I was getting cocky. You're right; she's probably Sarah Rogers b 1644 Weymouth. Maybe I should go take a nap.
There are other programs that do that; I know RootsMagic does. On there it's the "count trees" tool. It helped me find random Acadian profiles I'd adopted that weren't related to me, people I'd invited and they'd never taken me off their trusted list, etc. Very handy.

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