[postexitus]

question for anyone who may be interested - what would it take to implement those workflows with backlinks in MediaWiki - or is it just outright impossible due to current data structures used.

[trynewideas]

Off the top of my head, probably the Backlinks API[1].

There's also ongoing experimental work toward making the parser's backlinks support more usable.[2]

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Backlinks

[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AdvancedBacklinks