Knowledge systems which display contextual backlinks to a node open up an interesting new behavior. You can bootstrap a new node extensionally (rather than intensionally) by simply linking to it from many other nodes—even before it has any content.
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I first noticed this watching use Roam. As he took notes on our chats, he made certain noun phrases (e.g. my name, named theories) into node links. Those nodes had no content of their own, but after a few days, they developed an implicit definition through the backlinks.
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Those backlinks provide kindling for writing the "proper" content of the node later. Seems important for the system to display the backlinks' *context:* a simple list of backlinks won’t implicitly define a node very effectively. Gotta see the context around the link.
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Isn't that roughly the concept behind pagerank? The relevance of a website is defined by the websites that link to it?
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It's interesting to think about the relevance angle here—something you reference a lot is clearly important to you, even if you haven't written anything on it explicitly. But this is more akin to saying a website is partially implicitly defined by the websites that link to it.
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MediaWiki (the Wikipedia engine) lets you create links to pages that don't exist, and it makes empty pages for them. Click the link, then fill in the page. It's a way to indicate “this page should exist (sooner or later)”
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Early versions of Roam were like that, until we realized that often the collections of things I've written on **other pages** which reference [[Andy Matuschak]], are often as important or more than what I'd write on a page dedicated to him.
Thus Roam's references section
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Love the idea of boostrapping from backlinks! Knowledge creation is incremental and emergent, so you don't want a system that makes you define as much as possible when you make any note/link (as is the case in most notetaking apps).
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This is especially great for learning as a fly on the wall in discussions. I like to construct a mapping of terms and their relationships as they are used in dialogue. Over time, the conceptual structure reveals itself, even when I haven't defined anything directly.
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