my most galaxybrained small thing:huge effect opinion is that the Wikipedia Vector skin was a catastrophe for digital culture. Wikipedia, always an encyclopedia first and wiki second, introduced and innoculated a generation of people to wikis in a way that completely de-emphasized all the radical parts of wikis to appear like an encyclopedia. NO ONE KNOWS about "what links here," "wanted pages," or talk pages. so both the graph structure and dialogic reality of wikis is LOST. !/
taken in context with the historical moment, nupedia-> wikipedia's rise in the early 2000s, as a time when people still mostly interacted with individual websites, people were introduced to Wikipedia, not meatball wiki. so as geocities morphed into myspace into Facebook, there was no alternative (but forums) to creating your own digital space. Because people did not see wikis as the infinitely malleable cultural space they are, we got social media
the practice of wikilinking is transformative if you experience it like a wiki head. as you write, you [[wikilink]] your way through [[basic concepts]] that you know will be [[wanted pages]] at some point, so in the act of communicating you are also building the structure of information around you. by properly representing inlinks and outlinks, you completely explode the problem of "where does this information go:" because you will always be able to find it one hop out
but that, and the fluid creativity of discussion happening amidst the "factual information" is completely lost with Vector!!! it just barely exists. If we had something like Obsidian in 2002, the internet would be different.
@jonny I am unclear about this discussion. The way I see vector is that raw editing of infobox, templates are extremely dated concepts when every other editor(except competent MD/LaTeX) editors have adopted WYSIWYG. Even .MD is moving in WYSIWYG mode and latex is used much of the time for a single line of maths.
Vector skin feels a lot cleaner to me than it's predecessor, you can go back to the classic of course(I understand the power of defaults).
An opposite approach was something that I first saw in an app called Tomboy, a decade ago. There was no link syntax. Any existing note with the same title was automatically linked (some wikis call this "radiolinks"). Any text could be selected and turned into a link to new note. There were no red-links/wanted pages, because every single word could become a new page easily. Every page was wanted. It was probably the best writing experience I've ever had. Org-mode or howm doesn't come close.
@Sandra
interesting, this sounds like everything2, where each page could have multiple individual versions of it. how were delimiters between words/phrases done? and what was the notion of "page" titled under? or I may be misunderstanding
@Sandra
whoa and overlaps??? like if you had
multiple links to pages
And [[multiple links]], [[links to pages]] and [[multiple links to pages]] it overlaid all 3??
@Sandra
[[sorry anagora]]
@Sandra
and wait was that then reflected in syntax or was it a wysiwyg???
I don't remember, but what would make sense to me is to prefer the long one.
Like, if there's a mention of bad movies, you'd want to go to the note named bad movies and then from there go to a note named just movies.
(that is not a [[sorry anagora]] moment because those were totally on purpose).
And that, combined with always mutable page histories, is an extremely liberating thing!!! you literally never need to wonder "[[does this go here]]," "[[how do I write this]]" because the answer is always [[Yes]].