Help:What links here
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Within the Tools section at the top-right of every page (in the standard view) is a link labeled "What links here". This is used to see a list of the pages that link to (or redirect to, or transclude) the current page. These are sometimes referred to as backlinks
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It is possible to make a wikilink to the "What links here" list for a particular page; to do this type [[Special:WhatLinksHere/Page name]], replacing Page name with the title of the target page. (The same text – without the brackets – can also be entered in the search box, to access "What links here" for any page title.)
It is also possible to list the pages with {{Special:Whatlinkshere/Page name|namespace=number}}, where Page name is the name of the page, and namespace (optional) is the number of the namespace. E.g. {{Special:Whatlinkshere/Help:What links here|namespace=0}} lists all pages from article space that link to this page.
To use the tool, click Special:WhatLinksHere and type in the page title.
"What links here" is limited to showing actual backlinks. Pages which contain the title being searched for, but where the title has not been linked, are excluded from the results. An alternative script exists to search out such pages, where possible unlinked backlinks may exist for the respective article.
Value
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. Thus, for example, if film articles are linked to the actors, one can find the films an actor has played in even if there is no article about the actor.