UDWiki:Administration/Policy Discussion/Special:lonelypages

Background

Among the wiki's special janitorial pages is Special:Lonelypages, a utility page that displays all unlinked pages. This page has a myriad op uses to the janitorial editor, including, but not limited to:

1. Identifying pages that may need expansion or additional links.
2. Identifying old A/SD criterion 1's that may need deletion.
3. Identifying unused redirects (so far as I know, this is the ONLY utility page that will list them).
4. Identifying unused templates.

Now, assuming you clicked the above link, you probably noticed that this page has almost no entries under it.

This is because, for the past year or so, several users have seen fit to empty the page by linking these "orphaned" pages to their creator's talk, usually via Template:Orphan and Template:Yorphan. I've been told that these templates help convince the authors to link the pages, and that one could simply look at the template's "special:whatlinkshere" page to achieve the same results as Special:Lonelypages. Both of these claims are, to an extent, false.

As to the first "reminder" claim, I'd like to point out that a few brief checks of potential SD criteria 1 and 3 candidates turned up several old, unused redirects and C.1's that were only linked by the orphan claims:

1. [1]
2. [2]
3. [3]

As to the second "work-around claim," I can say, as a frequent janitor, that it simply doesn't work. the "whatlinkshere" approach does not discriminate between the pages that are still orphaned and the ones that have links. Discovering orphaned pages via this method involves clicking on the linked talk pages, scrolling down to the "orphan notice", clicking on the potential orphan, and then checking whatlinkshere to see if the page is even an orphan in the first place. This is ridiculously time consuming compared to the alternative of just typing special:lonelypages and seeing what pops up.

Proposal

1. The usage of orphan notices is now officially discouraged. Users who repeatedly post such notices without clear justification may be reported to A/VB.

   Justification would be defined as orphan-noticing a page that is otherwise difficult or impossible to link, but does not meet the criteria for deletion.

2. Any usage of an orphan notice must be done with external links, such as by <span class="stealthexternallink"></span>. This will be retroactively applied to the current instances of orphan templates.