Every page has a link labelled "What links here" (or, more generally, labelled with the text in mediawiki:whatlinkshere), also called backlink.
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