Full ack. "What links here" is one of the nicest features in Wikipedia, but
navigation elements make it nearly unusable due to the bug described here.

jnc wrote:

I agree that the behaviour you note is problematic. However, any
change would have to make sure that it doesn't create as many problems
as it solves - e.g. without a note on article page A that it includes
image I (via template T), when I is updated the code would have to do
a lot of (potentially recursive) checking (i.e. after checking "what
links here" on I, and discovering T, it would then have to check "what
links here on T", and so on) to note on all pages that (eventually)
include that image that they need to be re-rendered.

We have quite a number of bugs of this form with templates and/or
categories - see, for example,
[http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=939 bug 939]. The bug
you mention, where the "what links here" list on the image is not
fixed when the template is edited, is basically the same bug as the
category problem in bug 939.

puzzlet wrote:

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 939 ***

zigger wrote:

Reopened. Bug 939 asks for link tables and rendered pages to be effectively
current with template changes, which is more work, whereas this request seems to
ask for the Special:Whatlinkshere page to show less.

wiki.bugzilla wrote:

*** Bug 5691 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Navigational templates are only getting more elaborate over time. Many link to
dozens of items, making "What links here" practically unusable. Fixing this
problem would be a great aid to discovering and building up the web of
connections among articles.

If it links from the page, it links from the page.
It's not possible to determine what was "through" a template -- in particular
given the complex ability to generate links out of template interactions and
conditional code.

Yes, I'm aware of that by now. But I think it would be very handy to have that
ability. It would become possible if/when we insist on "syntactically complete"
templates, which has often be discussed, and I hope will come in the Golden Days
Of The Real Parser.

So, while I'm aware that it's impossible with the current database scheme and
parser, and would be non-trivial to implement even if that would change, I
request to leave this bug open as a desirable enhancement. I'll not reopen the
bug myself though.

djevrek wrote:

See also http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4588 "Group pages by
templates in list of file links on Image page" and
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241 "Transclusion should produce
tree-like results in "What links here" ".

You'll excuse my programming ignorance, but could there be any way of exploiting
whatever makes <noinclude></noinclude> work to prevent transcluded backlinks?

Or failing that, is there any way the programming could make a checklist of
what's on the transcluded templates, and then "manually" remove them from the
"What links here" page?

No, and no.

Well, what if we just use an outside link, e.g. [[w:France|France]] instead of
[[France]]? The only problem I can see with this would be cosmetic to the
reader (different link color), and a little more wikicode. Surely it wouldn't
be that hard to make a protocol that would take care of this, e.g. one could
enter [[t:France]] and it would look graphically resemble an internal link while
executing [[w:France|France]]?

I know this is not an 'elegant' solution but I think it would work well enough
for our purposes.

[Removing RESOLVED LATER as discussed in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-November/064240.html and closing as RESOLVED WONTFIX as per comment 7 and comment 11]

Note: Primehunter made a great list of many of the duplicate onwiki requests for this feature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=724187004#What_links_here_.2F_templates

I believe the focus of this request has moved to T5241: Transclusion should produce tree-like results in "What links here" as the best feasible outcome.