Editing Help:What links here (section)

==Limitations==
The following are ''not'' listed at "What links here":
*automatically generated links from [[Help:Category|categories]] to their subcategories and member pages (and vice versa)
*automatically generated links from [[Help:Subpage|subpages]] to their parent pages
*links in [[Help:Edit summary|edit summaries]]
*links in [[Help:Special page|special pages]], for example [[Special:LongPages]]
*links made with [[Help:Link#External links|external link]] syntax instead of wikilinks, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example instead of the wikilink [[Example]] made with <code><nowiki>[[Example]]</nowiki></code>
*links from outside Wikipedia

===Fragments===
In the case of links to [[Help:Section|sections]] or other [[Help:anchors|anchors]] (that is: [[URI fragment]]s), the precise target is not shown. Furthermore, "What links here" cannot list the backlinks of a specific section/anchor only. For instance, it is not possible to search for a links specifically to the section called '''Bar''' in a page called '''Foo''' by searching for '''Foo#Bar''' on the "What links here" page. Nor will searching for '''Foo''' on the "What links here" page tell you which links link to which sections in '''Foo'''. This is an unfortunate limitation, as it limits the ability to see if links need to be changed (or [[Template:anchor|anchors]] need to be created matching the old section names) when a section's name is changed.

Workarounds:
* Typically, this type of link can be detected with an insource search, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=linksto%3A%22foo%22%20insource%3A%2F%5C%5B%5C%5B%22foo%22%5C%23%22bar%22(%5C%5D%5C%5D%7C%5C%7C)%2Fi&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1&ns1=1 (note that this method will not catch all possible permutations of a section link, if used naively).
* Since the "What links here" page ''does'' list redirects to a sections in the page, another possible workaround is making a new title that redirects to a particular section, and encouraging people to make links to the redirect rather than the section. For instance, making a '''Bar (Foo)''' page that redirects to '''Foo#Bar'''. An additional benefit to this is that if the title of the '''Bar''' section on the '''Foo''' page ever changes, all pages that link to '''Bar (Foo)''' will link to the correct place once the redirect target of '''Bar (Foo)''' is updated.
* Another possibility is to use [[Help:Linksearch|Linksearch]] to detect section links, but here editors would have to add hidden external links, as linksearch only detects links made with the external link syntax.

===Backlinks===
As mentioned, backlinks which have not yet been linked are excluded from the results. An [[User:Lourdes/Backlinks|alternative script]] exists to search out such pages.

Also note that if a page's links change because of a change in a [[Help:Template|template]], the backlinks for that page are [[mw:Manual:Job queue#Updating links tables when a template changes|not updated immediately]], but via the job queue.