User:Andrewa/Incoming links

What they are
Incoming links (also called incoming external links to distinguish them from incoming wikilinks) are links to a page in Wikipedia from another part of the World Wide Web.

They include:
 * Links from unrelated web pages
 * Static ones such as ones from blogs and personal websites
 * Dynamic ones such as from search engines such as Google
 * Links maintained by web browsers
 * Bookmarks
 * Browser history
 * Links from Wikimedia sister projects

Some internal Wikipedia links also function much like incoming links:
 * Wikilinks in edit summaries
 * Diffs
 * Permalinks

Wikilinks from archive pages also function similarly to incoming links. Technically we could find and change them, but there are good reasons not to do so.

Why they matter
Wikipedia's focus is on our readers. And readers often access Wikipedia through incoming links.

Whenever a page is moved, incoming links are broken. To fix these broken links, the What links here Tool must be used at the previous page name to identify pages that link to the old name to change them to the new name.

Redirects can reduce or even eliminate the damage of many of these broken links. But in some cases, such as when a primary topic changes, this still causes inconvenience to the reader. Hatnotes are another important workaround, and normally reduce the damage to a single mouse click.

But whenever an article is created (or moved from another namespace such as draft) some believe it's best to put it at a name that it can keep. (Other pages don't matter so much.) Others believe it should be placed according to policy and guidelines at WP:AT and WP:D, even if that happens to be an ambiguous name.

Because, as soon is it's in the main namespace, incoming links will begin to spring into existence. And the more it's linked, either by wikilinks or incoming links, the more incoming links will be created. We can't put the genie back in the bottle.