linking
For lack of a better word to describe my activities on Scrapbox, I have been using the word "linking," but after thinking about it, I have never explained it, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it.
Linking: "parts of the text that *may* someday be connected to another concept" should be enclosed in [ ] and made into links.
There are a number of schools of thought on how to organize information. To put it briefly, the following four methods are mentioned here: A: create a folder and put the information in it, B: arrange the information chronologically, C: tag the information, and D: follow the links.
Style A has the problem that humans cannot find the "appropriate folder". If a folder called "animals and plants" was created and classified, it is difficult to immediately answer which folder euglena (freshwater flagellate) should be placed in. This is how "information in the appropriate folder" occurs, and you end up having to search around for the desired item because you can't find it, especially when you have multiple levels of hierarchy. This dislike has given rise to methods that choose not to categorize things hierarchically. This method avoids the hyper-organization of "One pocket principle" in which documents are organized in one place, or the top-down division into multiple notebooks of "[One notebook. In particular, advances in electronic devices have created a style in which documents can be arranged in chronological order, so that recently used items can be easily found, and old items can be searched for. Tagging was created to aid in search. For example, at present, science and technology do not allow us to search for images using "images in the human brain" as queries, so if we want to search for images later, we must add words (tags) that will serve as a starting point for the search. With the spread of smartphones, the cost of "taking a picture and uploading it to a cloud service" has dropped so much that a style of photographing paper documents, etc., uploading them, and tagging them as necessary has emerged. One famous example is Evernote. Although it is obvious, humans cannot immediately answer the appropriate tag, just as humans cannot immediately answer the appropriate folder. Therefore, the phenomenon of "no appropriate tag" or "wrong tag" inevitably occurs.
Scrapbox links can also be used as tags, and Scrapbox itself uses a different notation for the same function, [link] and # tag. This link' is a culture from the Wiki, and the link is to another page. This is where tags and links differ: a worldview where there are two kinds of things: content (text, images, PDFs, etc.)' and tags assigned to it', and only one kind of thing: everything is a page' and `the body of the page has links to other pages'.
In Scrapbox, if you link to X from page A, and then link to X from page C, both pages will appear as two hops away from each other. The idea behind Scrapbox is that it is impossible to "tag pages appropriately in advance so that they can be found in a search in the future," but instead, by linking pages together, after you find one of them in a search, you can follow the links to get to the one you want.
So my feeling is that linkage is a process of "connecting information to information". It is not only linking to existing "pages that we know exist," but also to pages that may be created in the future. I imagine that I am only creating entrances to pages that have not yet been written. This way, when the page is created in the future, it will be automatically connected, and when you try to enter a similar link on another page, it will be suggested to you. I feel that this will greatly accelerate Knowledge Connection. I feel uncomfortable with "link" as a verb. It feels like the act of connecting to a page that already exists. I see "link" as a noun for the entrance to a path to another page, and say "link it" with the nuance of "leave the entrance open.
Dr. Shiozawa describes tagging on Scrapbox as "tagging," but I don't use it because I consider tags and links as different concepts as mentioned above, and another reason is that I don't like homonyms because they are troublesome when speech is input.
After writing this much, I searched this Scrapbox for "linkage" and found 8 hits.
https://gyazo.com/9168ef153f73c787cd61f0666215ba83
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This page is auto-translated from /nishio/リンク化. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I'm very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.