(2023-10-25) Morris Wiki Nature

Mike Morris on WikiNature. WikiNature is found in linking. The very best wiki is one where pages cannot be created except by linking to the new, nonexistent page from an already-existing page. The newborn page is already linked, already has a relationship with other pages, just as a newborn babe comes into the world with relationships already in place.

And if links are fundamental, then automated backlinks become an essential affordance that must be immediately to hand, always present and visible and navigable, not hidden away in some folded-away footer, not requiring an action from me, the reader, to open them up. Even very small frictions create hindrance. (visible backlinks)

WikiNature is found in content-addressability. We link to a page by mentioning its name. (PageName as URL)

WikiNature is found in arranging things in a wide, flat space, in the absence of hierarchy.

The second element — linking by names — is where unaugmented Markdown fails as a wiki markup language… it only links by address. We have to add a new kind of notation for Markup to learn how to wikilink, and that, in itself, is a friction, and anti-affordance.