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When I am looking at a question and wish to explore the subject more, it is useful to look at all questions and answers that point to the given question (or one of it’s answers).

Please list them on the page somewhere, or provide a easy (one click) way of seeing them.

(A lot of pre-web hypertext systems had “back-links” as one of their building blocks with most links creating a two way relationship, this concept seems to have been lost in the web age.)

I have just change this to a feature-request, as I think a log of peole will find it useful to have back-links on all questions as standared.

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3 Answers 3

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This was implemented in April 2010 with the Linked posts feature.

When comments, answers or the question itself links to another question, they will both join hands and spot each other in the Linked questions list on the sidebar.

There is an upper-limit of 50 links.

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I played around a bit with Jared's sqlite datadump. My link test uses pretty naive regex matching to find the most-linked-to questions, so the results might not be 100% accurate, but the overall direction should be correct.

According to this test, these are the 25 most-referenced questions on Stack Overflow:

Edit: What counts is a link from a question or answer to another question or an answer to that question, not counting links within a question/answer thread. Links from comments are not counted.

Edit: I have updated the list after removing a bug in my program.

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  • Are these answers from other questions, from answers, or from the comments (such as the ever-popular Dupe comments)?
    – ベレアー アダム
    Sep 11, 2009 at 12:09
  • @Adam Bellaire: Good question, I've edited.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Sep 11, 2009 at 12:12
  • (sorry, I think we were tripping over each-other in the edit ;-p)
    – Marc Gravell
    Sep 11, 2009 at 12:14
  • @Marc Gravell: No problem, thanks for the additions.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Sep 11, 2009 at 12:14
  • How many people correctly guessed the deleted question? :)
    – Jon Skeet
    Sep 11, 2009 at 13:38
  • @Jon: Boat programming?
    – gnostradamus
    Sep 11, 2009 at 13:45
  • @Jon: Nope, I was wrong. I just hunted it down. Since when are the stubs of migrated questions deleted?
    – gnostradamus
    Sep 11, 2009 at 13:52
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    @gnovice - on demand only, and when the stub adds nil value.
    – Marc Gravell
    Sep 11, 2009 at 14:31
  • This example clearly illustrates a topology and metric with inherently valuable qualities. It identifies a community and opens up the discussion to include multiple questions. It will persist in reflecting value over long periods of time because it is has slow growth. It is insulated from abuse by the effort required to add non-duplicate questions that reference another. I think that over a period of years this metric would be very valuable for SO and other SE sites.
    – Brian M. Hunt
    Oct 2, 2009 at 15:07
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I was thinking about this the other day. It would be interesting to have a sort of graphical display, where you could zoom appropriately, but showing the interrelationships between questions. It would probably be more work than it would be worth. A simple list sounds like a good idea though...

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  • a sort of graphical display could be done by a 3rd party based on the site dump as a demo for a graph display control
    – Ian Ringrose
    Sep 11, 2009 at 11:04

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