Back-Linking

Beaumains
Beaumains
edited November 2011 in General Archive
Alright; I've been working on my wiki now for some time (on and off) - "Erdon":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/erdon/wikis/useful-editing-info - and been doing much of it on the fly, restructuring as needed; mostly concerned with the content. Recently however, I've come to realize that I will likely want to revise, and possibly revamp the system when it (eventually) comes to where I'm ready to call it "good enough".

In preparation for this (and other) possibilities, I thought I'd see if anyone knew of a way to find "all pages that link here" without A) manually creating immediate, individual back-links for every new (and pre-existing) page, or B) combing through every possible navigation option from the top. I figured I'd pose the question before things got completely out of hand, or before I started going through to manually complete the task. The second reason I have is that I hope it will serve as a way to ensure against pages lacking back-links, which I do intend to have (at least in some form) wherever it may be appropriate.

Of immediate concern is the issue of changing information on a page that may be referenced by other pages. For example, if I were to change the name of a class (for some strange reason) that was listed on the class reference page, and I had had other pages discussing the class in question by its previous name, but which linked through the class reference page, no link would be broken, but there would be a discrepancy in need of resolution. (The more likely scenario would be changing the name of a city or person or organization).

Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • RaseCidraen
    RaseCidraen
    Posts: 890
    Good morning Beaumains!

    As far as I'm aware, there's no way to determine what links to a specific page - it'd be a useful feature. It'd be difficult to implement, I think - I know that once you've created a character, you can change the name freely and the Character ID is fixed, and using that as a wikilink should autoupdate it.

    Sorry for not being much help.
  • Beaumains
    Beaumains
    Posts: 132
    Not at all! Thanks for your insight Rase! I was afraid there wouldn't be. I was asking specifically because I noticed that specific function is part of Wikipedia, and thought it would be a real big help. I can see how it might be difficult to implement automatically; there'd have to be some sort of two-way recognition; or an archetype that had a set of master links ... hmmm, maybe I can create one artificially - still a pain though (lol).

    As far as updates go, character or otherwise, the issue I'm concerned about is whether the display text in a 'linked-from' page will be altered to match the source page update. For example, if I referenced that a particular town was 'the notable home town of [Mr. Bogglesworth]' - and then changed that character name to [Mr. Bottlesworth], while the link might not be broken, I doubt the first instance would be auto-corrected. However, you might be onto something with the Character ID. Since the issue I'm looking at involves intermediate pages, which wouldn't change (except in the manner described), and no links would be broken, there might be a way to search for that underlying link, whether a character stub or a wiki title.
  • RaseCidraen
    RaseCidraen
    Posts: 890
    I think, if you're careful and use the character slugs, it should auto-correct.
  • Beaumains
    Beaumains
    Posts: 132
    Cool. I will definitely have to keep that in mind; at least I have a half decent (hopefully) solution to the Acheron problem (i.e. confusion).
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