Workflowy - Updates? News?

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 18, 2021 at 03:07 PM

Okay, I had a bit of time to play with it. It’s definitely a big new feature for WorkFlowy and opens up possibilities that weren’t available before.

However, in comparison with Roam, the big difference seems to be that the functionality of a link and its backlink is more of a local and manual process, than a global and automatic one (across the entire database).

What seems to be missing is the automatic search for the given link (as a keyword or phrase) and then the automatic creation of backlinks in every item or document where that linked keyword or phrase turns up.

This is what makes Roam so powerful. Let’s hope that this is something that WorkFlowy can catch up with in the future.

WorkFlowy could now work better as a Zettelkasten system, but due to the lack of this automatic global backlink creation, Roam would still be a more powerful option for that.

Here’s how such a system could work in WorkFlowy now:

1) Have one area (under one bullet point) for the writing of texts. This would be a writing workspace, as well as a repository of formerly written texts.

2) Have a Zettelkasten under another bullet point - reading notes repository. One could import these notes from elsewhere or start from scratch.

3) Have a References area under another bullet point: essentially a database of all bibligraphic references of sources for the Zettelkasten as well as referred to in the writing area.

Now, as one would be writing a new text in Area (1), you could manually create links to existing references (or create new references), such as e.g. (Smith 2021) would be a link to Area 3, and if you’re pulling in a quote or making a reference in the text to a Zettelkasten item, you could manually link from the text to the Zettelkasten item.

Then in the References under (Smith 2021) the backlinks would be displayed to both the article in Area 1, and to the given Zettel in Area 2, and the Zettel would also have a backlink to the text it was linked to from. (So there would be a triangular referencing relationship between the 3 areas.)

I’ve modelled this and this would work. The only reason I am unlikely to do this right away is that Roam would be still better for such a system, due to the aforementioned fact that in Roam every page containing (Smith 2021) would create an automatic backlink to the original (Smith 2021) item, while in WorkFlowy this would only happen to the specific pages where that singular link was created.