Do you think of links as having 'direction'?

#1

Many of us rely on links and backlinks to organise our wiki. Introducing backlinks allows you to think of linking as “two-way”, but even so a link still has an origin. By the term origin I mean the tiddler the link is from, rather than where it goes to.

If you only care about having a bidirectional connection between TiddlerA and TiddlerB, it doesn’t matter which tiddler you choose as the origin of the link.

However it seems possible to me that someone might conceptualize links in such a way that the direction of the link does matter.

So my question is do you care about which tiddler you use as the origin when creating links? Or in other words, do you make a conceptual distinction between links that go from TiddlerA, and links that go to TiddlerA?

Example: Let me use tags as a point of comparison. One might use tags to represent categories. So maybe I have a tiddler called “Dog” with the tag “Mammal”. In this case the direction of the tag is important - it would be strange to have a tiddler “Mammal” with the tag “Dog”, as I am using tags to represent categories rather than examples.

I know this question is kind of abstract, but I’ve been wondering about this for a while so hopefully you clever people have some insightful things to say on this!

1 Like
I'm missing a button - Mark all as read
#2

Yes, sometimes. It depends on how the link is used.

If I am connecting between two tiddlers of the same type, or on the same level of detail, then I don’t usually care that much; wherever it makes the most sense to work the link into the text of the tiddler. I do think of the outbound side as a “stronger” connection in some sense, just because the link is mentioned in the text of the tiddler, rather than just showing up in a backlinks list. For similar reasons, I might include a link in both directions in some cases (typically if they are very strongly related).

However, if I’m connecting between two tiddlers of different types or on different levels of detail, I consistently do it in a particular direction. With respect to detail, the more detailed tiddler will normally link to the more general tiddler; that makes it easier to automatically generate an overview on the more general tiddler if I want it later (or I might put a link in both directions in some cases). Similarly, if I have a tiddler describing an idea and a tiddler describing its source, the link goes from the idea to the source, never the other way around. There are probably more implicit rules I use for different pairings of roles that I’m not thinking about right now.

2 Likes
#3

I was trying to think about how to answer this. This is exactly how I think about it — the “source” is where I actively put a wikilink in the text.

The backlink is for following back to the source.

#4

I agree it depends!

I often think in database terms when considering links. It can depend on if you want a “one to one”, “one to many”, “many to one” or “many to many” relationship.

I am actually excited that under version 5.2.0 the fieldnames can now be almost anything.

  • This is because I can leave tags alone, and for example when wanting to establish a link to a related tiddler create a field called
    “related tiddler-link”
  • It then becomes possible to provide that field with a value that describe the relationship eg; more, subtask…
  • It even allows a two way relationship where that relationship is different in each directions eg in tiddler 1, tiddler2-link “subtask”. in tiddler 2, tiddler2-link “parent-task”.
  • in fact the field could be a list field and contain multiple relationships.
  • Configuring or extending the relink plugin could save any need to build tools that maintain “referential integrity” when tiddler names change, thus the link field needs renaming.
  • FYI
    • it is easy to find fields with the current tiddler title and suffix “-link” throughout the wiki, ie discover the reverse link.
    • it is also easy to convert all “tiddlername-link” fields on the current tiddler to actual links to tiddlers and obtain the value as the link “relationship”, or all fields with a particular relationship eg child
    • Often a relationship need be in only one direction be the reverse becomes implied eg; if I am “someone’s child” then that “someone is my parent”, if that parent is male its my father, female my mother, however with a different relationship type we can introduce step parents and more. A child could nominate a parent when the parent is not recognising the child.

The sky is the limit!, the trick now is learning how to navigate in the sky.

#5

Yes, in some ways you can not avoid a link having a direction.

#6

Thanks for your insights everyone :slight_smile:

Yeah I don’t have any explicit rules that I follow, but I’m sure if I really analyzed how I use links I’d be able to find some patterns.