Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-14250-20130712223621/@comment-188432-20130714140012

Princess Platinum didn't mean transclude. Transclusion is what most people think of as ordinary operation of a template. If your template name is delete, then transclusion looks like this: delete.

She meant substitute. And her solution of substitution definitely wouldn't address your issue. In fact, it would make it worse. You'd still have all the links that were in the template. Only, by substitution, the template would never auto-update, and you'll have an entirely new problem. Now the links that were tranclsuded would just be ordinary links; you'd have no way of telling the two types of links apart. Substitution dumps the contents of a template on a page and walks away. It doesn't create an active link to the current version of the template code. You definitely don't want to use substitution in this case.

Also, adding a prepending colon isn't the answer. That's a way of converting a page not in the template namespace into a template. So if we typed: it would mean, "Find the page called "Hello" and dump its contents on this page". Because there is no such page on this wiki, though, it's a redlink:. I use this all the time as a way to dump the contents of MediaWiki messages on pages. For instance, if I type I can easily show someone the local rules on uploading images. On this wiki, they're not very extensive. The contents are simply:



If you want there to be links in a template, then a WLH report will naturally list those pages on which the template is placed. In short, there is no solution to your problem, because it's not a problem. People want a WhatLinksHere report to give them a complete list of everything that links there — which includes the links caused by templates. You're trying to subvert the very purpose of a WLH report.

The good news is that there's a way to get what you want without going through a lot of tedious editing. Let's take a look at a typical WhatLinksHere result. I'll make it really big so you don't have to click on it to see what I'm talking about:

See the section called "filters"? All you have to do is hit the button "hide transclusions", and all your template links are gone. Easy. No special programming. No tricking out the templates. It's all right there, a natural part of the software.

And the thing is, there will be times when you want to look at transclusions. Trust me. You may not think so now, because you have in your mind a very specific project that you're currently working on. But there are applications for looking at transclusions, regular links and redirects individually.