Wiki has always taken a descenting position on web hypertext links. This requires distinguishing internal vs external links. The internal link leaves it to the wiki to find a suitable resolution resolution.
Now nine years into the federated wiki we remain convinced that the resolution “process” we defined to make pages “mobile’ in the federation is one of the best decisions we’ve made. A quirk of this is that our wiki must negotiate with the net when locating the text of a page.
This makes it hard to say what a link means outside of just looking when sites come and go. It’s not like a pointer in memory or a foreign key in a database. It is a “best effort” approach that meets a human need that is only recently coming into view.
This doesn't stop us from mechanically navigating the federation and reporting what we find.
We’re now doubling down on “plasticity” as the most leveraged representational advance we can make in the next decade. Lavin and Dennett describe how this works in living systems. post 