Linking (as curation)

Tying scattered things together so that others can build on them — the true strength of a shared wiki, and the smallest complete act of curation.

A link is a claim that two things belong near each other, made by someone who noticed. That is more than navigation. The set of links a body has made is most of what it collectively understands, because meaning lives in the relations between things at least as much as in the things themselves (Link concepts, not coordinates, Curation, The Incipient Link).

It is load-bearing because it is the cheapest possible contribution and one of the most valuable. Writing a page is hours of work. Noticing that four scattered mentions are about the same thing, gathering them onto one page, and saying a sentence about what you saw, is twenty minutes — and it makes all four usable by everyone who comes after (Knowledge as commons, Stigmergy).

Two disciplines make it work. Link generously: an unwritten link is a connection lost, and a link to a page that does not exist yet is not an error — it marks something worth writing, and marks it where someone will trip over it. Link concepts, not coordinates: link the idea by its name, not a path, a file, or a location, so that the link keeps meaning when everything around it moves (Link concepts, not coordinates, An address).

And the human half is not optional. What a person adds when they link is a reading — not only that these things are related, but how, and why it matters now. Links placed without that reading accumulate into a dense, useless web; links placed with it are an argument anyone can follow (Author's Voice Is Sovereign, Sensemaking, Second reader).

Also called: linking · linking to curate Stands on: Curation · Link concepts, not coordinates · Knowledge as commons Opens onto: The Incipient Link · The Living Library · One canonical home per concept · Weave, don't delete · Pattern Recognition · The Field · Wiki Is Primary And Standalone · Naming In play: Home — twenty minutes, by whoever noticed Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Blogs/the starter kit's Journal/Curation Example — 'community currency' (a 2022 journal post; linking, one of the true strengths of wiki — author's voice preserved) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV, §Knowledge as commons (Fable synthesis) · lionsberg.wiki: Knowledge As Commons Open: Named in a single demonstration post; the canon carries the practice everywhere and states it nowhere as a convention of its own.