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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The original wiki (c2) had this! Mention AnythingLikeThis and it becomes a node. Click on it, and you can ask what links to that node (an extra step). Unfortunately it’s no longer up
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Indeed! I was really struck, though, by how enormous a difference it makes to have the backlinks show the *context*. A list of links is pretty impenetrable; a list of *sentences*, though...
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Ah, very cool! This is one of the reasons I liked Google over Altavista. They showed my query words in context instead of showing the description of the web page.
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