Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Reading/Link Tree

Random proposal ►◄ Reading  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Link Tree

• Problem: We've all been there. We look up a term in Wikipedia only to be enticed by another term and another term until we have spent three fascinating, caffeine-filled hours discovering things we knew, things we didn't know, and things we probably should have left alone. At this point, we may have forgotten why we even came to Wikipedia in the first place. Or perhaps we wanted to follow up on the seventh son of the third king from that weird country in a link an hour back.
• Who would benefit: (A lot of) people that does that
• Proposed solution: Wouldn't it be nice to be able to click a link at the top of the page which would expand a Link Tree showing how you got to where you were and the links past you may want to visit again?
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Spiel 02:53, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

• Wouldn't browser history be adequate enough to solve this problem of ours? James Goner (talk) 06:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
  • I don't think so. The browser history contains links from other sources and is very cluttered (from my own experience). שוקו מוקה (talk) 09:34, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
• I think this would work best as a simple history of visited pages. Keepcalmandchill (talk) 11:07, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Which would be a serious privacy problem. Browser history, on your own machine, exists for a reason and there are many tools for managing it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  07:48, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• This can be achieved by using a browser extension that structures tabs into trees, and opening links in new tabs. See Tree Style Tab for Firefox. Silver hr (talk) 11:47, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Yes, I saw this one just the other day. It seems like exactly what the user is looking for. --Izno (talk) 18:46, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Must say it is technically possible. It is quite easy through something like ?from=China+Hong%20%Kong+1997%20%Handover, something like that. There's no limit really on the length of the articles, and surely can be done through some easy site engineering.--1233 （T / C） 18:21, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

• Even though browser history keeps being mentioned as being good enough, being able to see a path form at the top of your browsing page or something like that would be pretty cool! Then again, some people often just open a new tab/window to keep their original page so any link tree of some kind might have to be able to work with that too.

Voting

•  Support MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 21:43, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Strong support I have wanted this for a long time. --Redactedentity (talk) 23:40, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support PianistHere (talk) 01:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support OrCer (talk) 11:02, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Oppose it seems nice enough at first, but with so many articles linking to so many other pages in so many categories, things could get messy, and we'd be looking at a link rainforest. It ultimately wouldn't help, because we'd end up spending all day looking at the rainforest and not the trees. Tyrekecorrea (talk) 19:27, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support P.Marlow (talk) 01:31, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Alexcalamaro (talk) 05:52, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support AEbrahimiB (talk) 11:28, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support BoldLuis (talk) 18:05, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Susanna Giaccai (talk) 18:17, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Rdyornot (talk) 22:34, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support Pinage404 (talk) 22:38, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Oppose Too many privacy and complexity issues, and redundant with user-controlled browser history.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  07:49, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Oppose Same as above, plus the "back" button of you browser already does what is requested here. Vega (talk) 14:10, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
•  Support 郑洲扬 (talk) 11:57, 20 December 2020 (UTC)