Wikipedia talk:Orphan

No links at all or a “few” links

I would not know whether to add this tag to most articles here. Should the term “few” not be defined in order to make it useful? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Ottawahitech (talk) 17:34, 9 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It specifically says not to add it if one page links to it. To quote "as long as there is one other article which links to it, the article should not be tagged as orphaned." -DJSasso (talk) 17:54, 9 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the word "few" from the page. I hope no one objects? Ottawahitech (talk) 17:21, 10 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I see that "few" was restored. Personally I think to be an orphan, it needs to have zero links. If there is even one link, I do not think it to be an orphan. That is the established consensus over at enwiki. Some good things to read are the orphan criteria on en and the discussion on enwiki that resulted in current consensus. So I support removing "few" from the definition. Pinging @Ottawahitech: and @DJSasso:. Desertborn (talk) 16:01, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It was already removed again by me. We have always said it was typically one or a few but for the tag it was one. But I don't really care so I removed it again. It really makes no difference. But I would note on their criteria "Although a single, relevant incoming link is sufficient to remove the tag, three or more is ideal" which I believe is where our few comes from. -DJSasso (talk) 16:03, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What about pages that are linked to only from disambiguation pages

Some pages are linked to from a disambiguation page. If there are no other links should those pages be considered orphans? Ottawahitech (talk)

What links here

I just found a page I thought would probably be an orphan, but it turned out to have more than fifty articles linked to it. Problem is, I cannot see the links in many of those articles. Can anyone speculate on how this happens? Ottawahitech (talk) 03:41, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another questionable What links here is Special:WhatLinksHere/List_of_rivers_of_Canada. Ottawahitech (talk) 16:17, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Ottawahitech: You should keep in mind that the page could have been created to fix a red link as the purpose of them is to encourage new pages to be created. --Examknow ^talk 16:26, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A more likely scenario would be where a navbox template is used on multiple pages and there happens to be a red link in the navbox. This isn't a bug or anything - articles using a navbox inherently have links to whatever is in said navbox. Hiàn (talk) 16:29, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. That could also be another possibility --Examknow ^talk 16:30, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think you need to stop worrying about orphans to be honest. As mentioned before, we discourage tagging them etc. Trying to figure out all kinds of edge cases isn't helping anyone. -DJSasso (talk) 12:09, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And maybe using the word discourage isn't clear enough. So I will be a bit more blunt. We don't actually want the tag to be used. -DJSasso (talk) 12:12, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]