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Echo: Pagelink notifications triggered on template update
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Description

If an article has a navbox (say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:William_Blake) updates to it that add links trigger pagelink notifications, which might be confusing. Is there any way we can essentially blacklist the template namespace?


Version: master
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz48547

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 1:41 AM
bzimport added a project: Notifications.
bzimport set Reference to bz48547.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

From where we are triggering the notification, I'm pretty sure there is no way to differentiate, but it would be good to double-check.

I took a look through the code to double check what is available in the LinksUpdateAfterInsert hook which page-linked notifications are fired from. Unfortunately I'm also not seeing any way to differentiate between links generated from a template and links generated due to other means.

The parser itself replaces templates with static wiki text fairly early in the rendering process, so it has no clue where the links came from and cant tell us.

I briefly looked at if we could do something based on a list of templates that are used in the page, but since templates have conditionals i don't see it viable to attempt to look at the templates to determine what links to not generate notifications for.

There may be ways to do it, but nothing is jumping out at me.

I think I'm going mark this one WONTFIX as it would be quite difficult technically to differentiate template links from other links. We would probably have to do some significant hacking in core and it doesn't sound like the benefit would be worth the additional overhead of tracking that information through the rendering process.