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— Gustave Flaubert, Lettre à Louise Colet, 1853

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⚓️ 😘 de Paris, le mercredi 16 juin 2021

2021-05-28 Chris Aldrich : Creating Internal Backlinks for MediaWiki for Digital Gardeners

Création de backlinks internes pour MediaWiki pour les jardiniers numériques

Article de Chris Aldrich en markdown sur la transclusion des Backlinks/rétroliens dans MediaWiki

I’d spit-balled the general idea of showing backlinks or bidirectional links on a MediaWiki instance last year when thinking about and adding Webmention to one. Tonight I tinkered around and actually set it up on an instance. Within a MediaWiki, one can [transclude all the backlinks from other pages](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion) to a particular page by adding a line for transcluding content like the following when editing a page:

{{Special:WhatLinksHere/NomPage|limit=1000}}

You can see a live example of the practice on my user page on the IndieWeb wiki at iwc:User:Boffosocko.com#Backlinks along with [the code I used] iwc:User:Boffosocko.com&action=edit&section=16 by clicking on the edit tab. The effect is rather nice, particularly when put into columns when there are lots of entries. I’ll have to look into automatically coding something like this into every page now, but [being able to do it manually](https://indieweb.org/manual_until_it_hurts) is most of the battle, right?

Doing this along with adding display for external webmentions quickly vaults MediaWiki to a solidly first class [web-enabled digital commonplace book/digital garden/Memex/zettelkasten tool](https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book) that can communicate with other similarly enabled tools. (Now if only Webmention were supported natively on MediaWiki… but there are definitely ways around this in the meanwhile.)

To go the extra mile, I know there’s the [ability to interlink wikis](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interwiki) with some custom syntax or even to show [hovercards](https://indieweb.org/hovercard) within a wiki. Both MediaWiki and Wikipedia already allow this after enabling [page previews using hovercards](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews) in 2018. (I’ll have to check out if one could do hovercards across wikis as well!?!)

I’ve slowed down some of my experiments with my personal MediaWiki in preference to using Obsidian lately. Perhaps, for working in public, I’m going to have to resume some of my experiments and/or figure out a way to mirror the content?

↬ Sister Heather Kristine in [knowledge-management discord for Obsidian](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/710585052769157141/848901926791544882)(05/28/2021 22:41:02) for [re-sparking idea](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/710585052769157141/849133491873644544). *[↬]: hat tip