Some notes on why-I-write-how-I-do in wiki, as an opening towards future design.
# Expectations and Context
We see the need to structure wiki for the hitchhikers project between factual pages and narrative pages. Expectations regarding the reader should be carefully set in advance of reading.
- On Context - On Facts
It is not clear (yet) how to achieve this—perhaps visually using some new design hints, perhaps using some sort of visually appealing Wiki Front Matter.
# Missing Links
Broken or missing links are extremely annoying. However, some authors may use missing links as an invitation for participation, or as a memory device to undertake some future writing.
Current tools in wiki do not properly support this behavior, and I describe briefly the sort of writing tools I expect to use in my own practice this year.
How these fit with the preferences of other authors, or whether there are better options for group practice, is not yet clear. These pages have been created to stimulate a dialogue between hypertext authors to help establish best practice.
# On the use of bullets
Ward does not like bullet points (or markdown in general). It is not clear why, but it may be some mix of the complexity of coding markdown and its lack of visual appeal from his perspective. Others may feel similarly.
As a Dyslexic Author, I need to see some visual shape to the page. Simple text is a blur. The use of the occasional bullet point, and other devices (such as an image), is necessary for the meaning to be absorbed quickly and the page to be remembered.
I have started to like the use of a single bulleted link between paragraphs as a sort of hypertextual aside. The link suggests an associated point, and being sandwiched between two paragraphs, this linked aspect gains context.
Finally, I see such links as a form of poetry, where the links themselves (without the long-form text) read as a type of page summary. While in reading mode, you skip the links, only reading them when bored or requiring more depth.