"A link has two ends, called anchors, and a direction. The link starts at the source anchor and points to the destination anchor. A link from one domain to another is said to be outbound from its source anchor and inbound to its target." - Wikipedia

So a link does have direction, which I guess should have been obvious from the procedures in making hyperlinks. Actually, when I use hyperlinks, say in OneNote, I usually want a directionless connection. So, I have to make two hyperlinks.

So it must be false that programs with "linking" avoid posing a choice about subordination-superordination. A wiki is completely isoomorphic with an outline with cloning. Or is there some distinction I'm missing?

In general, you have a graph as the underlying structure in your outliner.

From graph theory, there are directional and undirected graphs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_graph_theory#Direction

Most often, outliners provide only trees - a connected graph with no loops.

UltraRecall, for example, provides "logical linking", which means undirected connection.
Hyperlinks (in UltraRecall called internal links), provide directed connection

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

So a
link does have direction, which I guess should have been obvious from the procedures
in making hyperlinks. Actually, when I use hyperlinks, say in OneNote, I usually want
a directionless connection. So, I have to make two hyperlinks.

So it must be false
that programs with "linking" avoid posing a choice about
subordination-superordination. A wiki is completely isoomorphic with an outline
with cloning. Or is there some distinction I'm missing?

I don't think I agree with this statement completely. I can see how this does blur the lines a little. However, the purpose of an outline, even one with cloning, is to impose a hierarchy of ideas -- without this hierarchy an outline becomes somewhat meaningless. In a wiki, links (though they may be directional) are not necessarily intended to create superiority or subordination. For instance, I can have a link from item A to item B and from item B to item C and from item C to item A.

I guess, what this boils down to for me is what the user is intending. I see the links in a wiki not as a way to impose structure, but as a convenient method for creating and navigating to related topics. There is no logical reason a program couldn't provide both a rigid hierarchical categorization and have wiki linking -- you would just need to select a parent topic when creating the linked item. In fact, I believe this is exactly the way Wikidpad works.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

guess, what this boils down to for me is what the user is intending. I see the links in a
wiki not as a way to impose structure, but as a convenient method for creating and
navigating to related topics. There is no logical reason a program couldn't provide
both a rigid hierarchical categorization and have wiki linking -- you would just need
to select a parent topic when creating the linked item. In fact, I believe this is
exactly the way Wikidpad works.

Or someone could even use a non-wiki quasi-outliner for navigation. At least this is possibel in Ultra Recall, whose users often subordinate one Infoitem (i.e., a note) to another for that purpose. (See Quant, above.)

If navigation is generally the preferred use of links in a program like Connected Text, the overlapping parts of the network will have a different character than where you use connections based on commonalities or resemblence. But I would be _more_ surprised to find deeper meaningful patterns in a structure designed for navigation as apposed to categorization, because navigational convenience is so task-specific.