[sparkzilla]

I think the Bush essay is totally fascinating. I have never seen it before and it's amazing to think it was written such a long time ago. However, both it and the Federated Wiki both miss an important part of the how textual information is created and linked on the web, by talking about "articles". In the essay the user reads through articles and links between articles, while in wiki systems the contributors' goal is usually to build an article. IMHO the focus on creating articles is the cause of a great many problems on wiki systems, and it also influences the discussion of linking.

Taking Wikipedia as an example, readers build up an article piece by piece to create a long text article. However, much of the information inside the article can be better represented as data. Articles are rigid, and the text inside them cannot be manipulated easily. For example, instead of a long article, a biography can be represented as a timeline of events. That timeline of events (as data) can then be manipulated (filtered and sorted) by the end user to give whatever view they want. It's not just a matter of following a trail (as the Bush text says), but of collecting the information as you go.

Instead of acting as a database of facts or events, Wikipedia acts like a book (a paper encyclopedia). Sure it has interlinked pages, but that's where it stops. Because it acts like a book it seems acceptable to have its external links represented as footnotes in a reference section under the main text. Federated wiki runs into the same problem too because it's focus is also on articles -- the result of collaboration is a page that cannot act as data.

But the web is not a book and both articles and footnotes (and lack of other multimedia features) are not native to the way it functions. I think there are many better solutions to this problem than going back to footnotes. The medium is the message and solutions need to stop trying to make the web work like a book, but to make it work for the web.

I have been working on much of the above on my site. I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking is handled by nouns. http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-links/

[notahacker]

I have to say that whilst Wikipedia's referencing implementation and policies are horrible from an editor perspective, I think they're about right for the reader. The raison d'être for the footnotes is to indicate the statement can be verified for editors and other determined fact-checkers rather than to point the average reader towards other encyclopedic material, and many of the references are page references for dead tree media. As such they're not intended to be the first point of departure for the median reader, and so shouldn't have the same prominence as the internal links or "further reading" external links, let alone significantly more prominence if they support a few facts referenced at different points in the the article. Despite being afforded less prominence than the Wikilinks, they remain much more usable than footnotes (or especially endnotes) in a book.

I'm also struggling to see how the Newslines implementation would be a better solution in the case of the Tom Hanks article referenced in your blog. I mean, would linking the word "immigrated" to a seven minute YouTube clip mostly not on the subject of Tom Hanks' ancestry reduce confusion? I think it would make it worse. The problem isn't the extra click, the problem is that the source is a fraction of a seven minute chatshow clip.

I agree with your points on timelines and data, but in fairness Wikipedia isn't and shouldn't try to be the whole internet. People who have the programming/UX skills to a specific subset of content appropriate form and functionality are always going to be a step ahead of random strangers tweaking text.

[sparkzilla]

We use a footnoting system to reference books, although with increasing digitization this should be less necessary. As for the Tom Hanks example, you're right, that should include the YouTube "start time" parameter to link directly to the exact time he talks about his ancestry. Adding that parameter shows another advantage of direct linking -- that it can go deep into a video source.

I don't agree that the footnotes system is good for the reader or editor, because it obfuscates the link between the text and the source. It is very easy to add biased information to any wiki page. Let's say someone writes "Donald Trump calls McCain a war hero" but the reader thinks, "Hmm that's not what I heard". On Wikipedia they have to go to the footnotes and then click through, losing track of where they were at on the main article. How many people will do that? Not many. So the reader gets misinformation, and loses trust in the site, and the bias remains.

Instead if a link direct to the video is added then the person will know straight away. Even better if the video is embedded directly, but that's another story.

[nbadg]

The critiques you raise against Wikipedia, both here and in the linked post -- skeuomorphism, functional fixation, aversion to rich/embedded content, etc -- I think are very apt.

I'll echo eponeponepon's comment: very sincerely, it's an elegant approach, but what happens with more than 2 links? In particular, (and this is already a concern with only the two links), do you have any UI cues that those links are separate? Because I'd be concerned (I'm paranoid about this on reddit) that, without additional UI cues, it seems like they're the same link. Amusingly I had this exact problem on your blog post, even though I'd already read the explanation: in the final "Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order" I was expecting the orange link highlight on "Barack Obama signs" to be one link, and the black "Minimum Wage executive order" to be another, despite having just read subject vs verb linking.

Might I suggest two link classes with slightly different CSS colors? If you're already using automatic page formatting and link generation, you could just alternate between the two classes, thereby providing an immediate visual cue that they're different links.

[spc476]

I've done that for my blog (http://boston.conman.org/) where darker colors refer to links "further away" (brightest are internal links to other blog entries, darker are links to external sites) although the effect may be too subtle.

It also only helps if the reader knows of this (and in my case, that's pretty much been me).

[sparkzilla]

It's a bit confusing. It's probably best to underline the external links.

[sparkzilla]

Thank you for the compliment. I was looking at the Barack Obama link too and thinking the same thing. Either using different colors, or a small popup that gives more information, would work.

[e12e]

I think it is logical to want a curated database as a companion to wikipedia. WP aims to be an encyclopedia - a collection of articles on a subject; not a collection of data, a dictionary, a taxonomy/ontology, a time-series database of world history.

That doesn't mean such efforts aren't interesting - see eg:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/

But I think it is important to realize that both can be useful. Perhaps there is room for something that blends traditional hypertext/hypermedia and articles better - fundamentally I think such a system will be more like a complex (object) programming system than text. It would need to be somewhat self-organizing (eg: do how would you like to present a list of published works; on a timeline? With short reviews? In a map?) - and it would probably have similar issues that a large multi-user codebase has.

I suppose lively-kernel.org moght be one approach to making something like that (smalltalk-like js run-time in the browser with webdav for code/data storage).

[eponeponepon]

  I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source 
  link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking 
  is handled by nouns.

That's a very elegant idea; I congratulate you very genuinely. I wonder where you'd head if you had a third category of links, though?

The single biggest problem that gnaws at me is what to do when a single (hotspot|link|icon) needs to point the reader to two completely unrelated remote resources (e.g. a scholarly edition of some text where notes on the original manuscript and editorial additions refer to the same segment of text - or worse, overlapping segments.

In the print world, the only options are this kind of thing[1][2], or eschewing markers in the text in favour of references in the notes - but carrying either over when so many more options are available electronically feels lumpen to me. Drop-down menus are an obvious solution, but have huge dependency on the display agent to behave properly.

[edit: layout, phrasing]

[sparkzilla]

A popup or dropdown could be used to show multiple external links. We have found though that if we need to add an extra source, we simply add an extra sentence that has its own verb. For example:

Person A claims that Person B did something, but person C claims otherwise.

We use a different source links on each italicized verb. This works for us, due to the way we write posts, although there are some edge cases. It'd be interesting to see if it works for other sites with different requirements. The principle is to avoid footnotes and try to match the links meaning directly with the text. As the other poster mentioned, there perhaps should be a color distinction, or some other identifier.