Automatic Linking

Affordance that helps a Wiki or Digital Garden grow.

• 2022: these days people might think that "automatic" means "done by AI", which isn't what I want. See digital gardening for some thoughts relevant to that.

Context

• you have wide/varied interests, and try to use Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and Recursive Writing/Thinking Out Loud to grow your own knowledge/understanding of various things over time.
  • at a given moment in time you may have a topic you are exploring deeply, while still skimming along on others (making brief notes as you come across interesting pieces from other people, for your own future reference)
• see also Why Use A Wiki For Your Notebook section of Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems.

Forces

• you don't have an immediate payback/deliverable associated with your writing, so an overly FormalProcess isn't something you wish to follow.
• because of your Recursive Writing process, you want to keep thoughts relatively granular so they can related to each other in a network (HyperText).
  • see Fractal Dimension Of A Hypertext Space
• you want to branch off new thoughts easily; you may think of some during creating/editing a given page, but not want to go off in that direction at the time
• or someone else may be inspired to branch off a new thought, in a shared environment.

Solution:

• have a writing system that makes the creation of new pages, and linking to existing pages, as simple as possible
• ideally, a system that allows some kind of Automatic Linking!
• this also gives you BackLinks

Wiki typically does this through the Smashed Together Words approach. You Link As You Think. Then you, or someone else, can spin off a new page without even editing the current page. (And the create-new-page link for each phrase missing a page is a form of inspiration/nudging.) "Link Phrases, Make Pages!"

What other approaches to Automatic Linking might work?

• putting double brackets around key phrases isn't bad, though Smashed Together Words is more likely to nudge you into picking a sufficiently short and reusable expression of your concept. Which will lead to greater Accidental Linking. But double brackets can be fine as long as you don't make all your page names ridiculously long, because then you'll probably never link to them.
  • also note that in a constrained environment like Twitter, using double-brackets eats up 4 extra characters for every WikiWord you use. I use Smashed Together Words in Twitter, EMail, Discussion Forums, etc.
  • hmm compromise by using HashTag in front of Smashed Together Words? That makes the rendering code easier, but doesn't really improve things for the writer or reader.
• ???

Related: Page Name As URL, WikiWord As Tag, WikiWord Vs Search

Opposing Anti Pattern: Free Link.

Sept'2015: rethinking my preference for Smashed Together Words

Why: because people writing for non-wiki-natives don't want to look weird or have to explain themselves.

• related: Mike Caulfield facing similar thinking with SFW.

Pro

• The SmartAscii/Mark Down view is cleaner, no extra punctuation littering the page.
  • Even more of an issue when using non-wiki environments like Twitter - brackets are ugly plus you lose 4 characters for every WikiWord!
• Faster to type, esp on Mobile Keyboard where bracket keys are buried away.
• You get Page Name As URL.

Cons

• Single-word WikiWords are a nightmare, you have to arbitrarily capitalize an extra letter.
• Names with mid-caps get separated in rendering (Expanding Wiki Words) (e.g. Dave McClure).
• Smashed Together Words phrases can't have any punctuation.
  • btw note that ' is allowed in a URL! Hmm, so could have Here'sAPhrase, if your WikiEngine handles it right. Here'sAPhrase - MoinMoin does not
  • but can't use ?, and I think . is potentially confusing, so probably good to strip and ending punctuation
  • is there any other punctuation you'd find necessary within a WikiWord phrase?
    • '/' like Either/Or?

Facts that don't affect design decision

• SEO works fine now for words in URL-s with no separators, as of early 2015.

So latest thinking

• do double-bracket Free Link
  • hmm, for Mobile editing, because bracket keys are hidden away, add ribbon with "surround selected text with brackets" feature? Could also have button for "do Auto-Complete of selected text"?
• document/encourage "best practice" for that (to maximize Fractal Dimension Of A Hypertext Space)
• decide on some code features to catch/correct slight linking errors
  • case-insensitivity
  • Auto-Complete
  • use Smashed Together Words in Social Media, batch-uploader code can catch (won't have other styling bits to worry about)

Next: look at some "good" sites that use Free Link to catch any weird punctuation cases I'm not thinking of...

• using period - esp for people with initials - I. F. Stone
• using parentheses
• using commas
• using question mark
• using non-ascii latin - looks right but character gets dropped entirely from URL (I'd call that a bug)
• basically, for the URL, SFW makes all lower-case, turns spaces into dash, and anything that isn't ascii-alpha/num/dash gets stripped
  • Wikipedia does different rules for making the URL
    • underscore instead of dash for word separator
    • doesn't change case of letters
    • non-ascii latin characters get preserved in URLs
    • punctuation gets escaped