Links

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 26, 2007 at 04:14 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>guess, what this boils down to for me is what the user is intending. I see the links in a
>wiki not as a way to impose structure, but as a convenient method for creating and
>navigating to related topics. There is no logical reason a program couldn’t provide
>both a rigid hierarchical categorization and have wiki linking—you would just need
>to select a parent topic when creating the linked item. In fact, I believe this is
>exactly the way Wikidpad works.

Or someone could even use a non-wiki quasi-outliner for navigation. At least this is possibel in Ultra Recall, whose users often subordinate one Infoitem (i.e., a note) to another for that purpose. (See Quant, above.)

If navigation is generally the preferred use of links in a program like Connected Text, the overlapping parts of the network will have a different character than where you use connections based on commonalities or resemblence. But I would be _more_ surprised to find deeper meaningful patterns in a structure designed for navigation as apposed to categorization, because navigational convenience is so task-specific.