Every Page Links Out

A page with no links out isn’t finished.

Context

A site, wiki, or body of documentation that grows piece by piece over time, often written by different people.

Problem

Pages written one at a time tend to become islands. A guide loses the reasons behind it and becomes a recipe. A theory essay loses its practical consequences and becomes a slogan. Readers who arrive from a search engine land on one page and never see the rest.

Forces

• A commons is a set of relationships, not a pile of resources (Understanding Knowledge as a Commons; The Magna Carta Manifesto).
• Alexander’s patterns get their meaning from their links to larger and smaller patterns (A Pattern Language). The original wiki was built on the same idea.
• Hand-maintained links drift as pages change.

Solution

Therefore, link every page to the other pieces in its thread, to the table, to the patterns it introduces or applies, and to the sources it draws on.

Actions

• Fill in front matter (threads, patterns, patterns_applied, sources) so the website can generate the table, the thread footer, and pattern backlinks.
• Keep hand-written links in the body to the ones that carry meaning.
• After renaming a file, search for its old name and fix every reference.

Consequences

• Positive: readers who arrive anywhere can find the rest, and reasons travel with instructions.
• Negative: generated links depend on front matter being right, and links break when files move. The site build checks front matter; renames still need a search.