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
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.
