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 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Retrofuturism | (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).
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I made a [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29&oldid=668003092#.22What_links_here.22_for_article_sections | post about this on VillagePump ]] and it got some support so I'm taking this here.
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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.