So currently there's the "What links here"-feature that shows all Wikipedia-pages that link to the current article. However the entries don't signify whether or not those links are linking to just the page or to a specific subsection of it.
I'm proposing a change that either:
- Also shows the subsections that pages link to on these "What links here"-pages (example).
- Or (and I'd prefer that; it could also be done by an external AddOn/Gadget though): displays some kind of button next to the section-header at mouseover which at a click shows all articles that link to that section (for editors only; eventually also only for those who enabled this feature in the preferences). I think the first thing to do in this case however would be to get anchor links on section-headers -> I'm going to create a section in here on that in a minute as it's a separate issue.
So why would this be useful? -> it's useful when renaming section-headers to make sure the wikilinks that link to them don't break (amongst other things such as checking which sections are getting lots of attention for controversial articles).
I made a post about this on VillagePump and it got some support so I'm taking this here.
User Ceyockey also suggested some specific details on how this could be done and also proposed IDing those sections independently of their titles so that they can be "healed" (semi-)automatically (which could be harder to do though) - here's the quote:
I think this would be useful, but maybe not as a baseline addition to the system. I think that at first one would want to create a routine to analyze incoming links to see if the originations have # cues and then do a validation to determine whether the #-value exists in the target article. There might be a couple of ways of doing this; if memory serves, there is an ordinal value assigned to sections sequentially which is independent of the title of the section; thus, there might be a way of "healing" broken section references if the order of sections has not changed. This would require some significant bot-heuristics looking at, for instance, the content of the first sentence and the number of paragraphs in the section as measures of identity between old-name section and new-name section ... maybe more trouble than its worth, but I'm not bot designer, so it might be reasonable.