Provided that we are able to keep consistency across the whole vault, that would be great!
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Yes, that’s the challenge. What happens when these references move or change? That problem hasn’t been solved for header references yet.
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Hi, @ryanjamurphy.
Thanks for your remarks here. For sure the feature is not only “because Roam has it”. The concept of block reference and transclusion is much older than Roam and is quite useful, although it takes a bit to get used to the idea. Once it clicks, you’ll be asking why the hell you’ve lived so long without knowing this :
The Bible case you mentioned is just a tiny example of what can be achieved. Think also about evolving documents, where you can make reference to tiny bits of information (block) while working on both: the block and the document itself (any writing project can benefit from that: articles, thesis, books, …)
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I’ve been requesting for this feature since I first started using obsidian beta, and although I am code-illiterate, can tell how difficult it would be to achieve this functionality.
for now, as some people have already mentioned, I’ve just been trying to make each file as granular as possible, and when appropriate to do so, to sort of work as a “block”, nesting links into larger notes
would be interesting to see what people come up with in the future as a work around! perhaps some neat plugins 
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Not to disagree, but to challenge: I think there’s an important difference between a feature being used and it being useful.
The entire Internet operates—very successfully!—without block referencing. So the question is, what can we do better (i.e., more effectively, efficiently, easily, etc.) with block referencing than with currently-available feature sets? Put it a different way, what are the affordances of block referencing, and are those affordances worth the effort of using them?
To repeat and to be clear, I’m not saying that block referencing doesn’t improve upon anything. I just want to hear some clear and concrete examples of workflows in which block referencing would leapfrog what we can do already.
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Block referencing allows me to include the information in a paragraph in a separate document without copy/paste. Then if I edit the block it is edited everywhere. It is hugely powerful. I’m loving Obsidian but have not yet cut the cord to Roam specifically on this one issue. Where I see Obsidian “not yet there” is on workflows that allow me to compose in one note while rapidly scanning for and incorporating content in other notes. I may not have figured it out yet but currently I’m finding it quite kludgy to edit in one window and then review other windows for content to include.
An example workflow in Roam that has been linked in these forums before:
Nate Eliason using Roam to quickly outline article
Personally including blocks from other pages as a linked quote is a huge part of creating summary pages etc on a given topic.
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In the most simple sense, it’s an extreme/advanced quoting. We’ve been quoting forever, block level transclusion is just leveraging tech to allow quotes to be “live” & their transformation/use to be traceable.
Hyperlink & hypertext was always supposed to have bi-directional links, and the ability to tracing sources/changes to the origin/steps, since the beginning of the internet. We’ve had a nerfed version of what the next could have been due to it.
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Right, HTML is built for this, Markdown not so much
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Oh, not sure if that read like I was referring to Obsidian as being nerfed (I don’t think it is). I meant how we use links/quotes on the internet. Our concept of hyperlinks & their function is limited because the promise of the interest hasn’t been met.
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The reason I like block referencing is because I don’t want to deal with titles for every little thought. I want to do the title, content, and linking in a single line, if possible. I know you can do automatic ZK style titles, but those seem needlessly uninformative.
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This is a part of the reason I don’t like block references (as being described here). On one hand I really like the idea of using a quote or idea and pointing back to the original source. And it’s incredibly powerful for that link to be bidirectional, so the source can point to all of its references. But if that source changes, then everywhere it’s referenced changes and context can be easily lost.
So the referenced blocks would have to be immutable. If you want to change the source, you would have to create a revision. This way you can reference a particular version of a concept or quote and also see how it changed over time and not lose any context in the references. This is also incredibly powerful.
How any of this relates to what Obsidian should or should not be doing in terms of block referencing, I’m not sure. I think I ended up accidentally channelling Ted Nelson for a minute there 
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Interesting. I don’t think I see the issue though. If you want a backlinked quote that doesn’t change all you have to do is copy/paste and type a [[link]] . In that case addressable blocks would still be useful as you could link directly to the block rather than the last header.
What I am trying to do is to include my current thoughts on a topic in another page that may be a summary or a discussion that references. I might include a block in 10 other pages but if later I stumble on something that enhance my take on this I can change it in one place and it changes everywhere - as opposed to me need to go to each of those pages and change it. Those locations always contain my current take on the topic.
So in the tool that allows it I may use either approach depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. Block referencing allows me to have atomic notes in a longer page but still use them as individual thought units.
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I agree with this usage. I find it really hard to create atomic notes for everything, but I do make a lot of atomic bullet points that could be referenced elsewhere (not that I actually do, but that’s my own issue).
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I agree - I’m not sure either. What I am still struggling to figure out in Obsidian though is how I can accomplish the same rapid-fire aggregation of linked thoughts into a new topic that I can over on the river Tiber. There are many reasons I prefer Obsidian if I can just figure out the right workflow (and in fairness I think some things in the pipeline will help). There is a tsunami of suggested features here and in Discord - for me the effective knowledge management use case is the key though.
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There are many use cases reported on this thread. I’m not sure what exactly you are challenging.
The argument that “the entire internet operates very successfully without block referencing” does not make sense to me. Humans operated during centuries without email or instant communication. While these technologies were developed, I’m sure there were groups of people arguing that the good and old (snail) mail got the job of sending messages done. Therefore, the effort of developing such technologies were unnecessary.
I believe block referencing would be a very useful, albeit advanced and hard to implement, feature for Obsidian. Many use cases are listed above.
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Thanks—though most of those weren’t shared until I encouraged folks to do so… 
Again, don’t take challenge as disagreement. I am excited by the idea of block referencing, too, but I’m self-critical. I used it while I was experimenting with Roam Research, but I’m not sure it actually led to an improvement in thinking (the only thing that actually matters in these systems). By challenging the community to reify and scrutinize the utility of block referencing, I’m hoping to draw out the nuances of the feature, so that we may think of approaches to implementation.
Yes, the Internet example is a bit of a red herring. My point was that block referencing hasn’t been implemented in the Internet proper (nor in many of the celebrated examples that people point to as successes of knowledge management, like Andy Matuschak’s notes or Wikipedia itself). There’s likely a reason for that; I wonder why?
As far as I can see, there can only be two reasons:
- Implementation is more difficult than it’s worth; or
- Block referencing actually isn’t as useful as many think it will be.
So, I appreciate the examples shared in this thread, but I still think the reason block referencing isn’t a standard in information management is #2 above. I have been extremely open to understanding how it would improve note-taking. Sincerely, I want that light-bulb moment! Alas, none of the discussions I’ve seen have led to one.
All that said, I have actually come up with a way of implementing block referencing in Obsidian without compromising the fundamental principles of the app.
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@ryanjamurphy my apologies if my reply read as a harsh response. I re-read the thread and noticed that the examples were shown only after your post.
I read your recommended approach for block reference - Obsidian-style. I agree that using small, atomic notes is the easiest way to have this kind of “block referencing”. I’m not sure in terms of usability, though. It would be great if we could have an example similar to what @nickmilo did for his IMF approach.
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@ryanjamurphy: you made some good points in a constructive way, I am sincerely impressed. When, after reading through this thread, I came to this answer, i.e. that it IS possible to have block references, I felt deflated. I felt deflated because when you explained how it is done, I immediately thought "why on earth try to imitate Roam so frenetically when the block linking possibility exists? Reading some feature requests I get the feeling people try to turn Obsidian into a Roam clone. Beats me.
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@Klaas I guess it’s all a matter of the perspective you brought with you as you got introduced to Obsidian.
I’d never heard of Roam and came across Obsidian first after having read the book How to Take Smart Notes which lead me from the zettelkasten forum straight here. So when looking through such glasses, the concept of block referencing sounds like a shortcut that could end up hurting your thinking (what @ryanjamurphy alluded to above).
But seems a lot of people arrived on Obsidian after first having used Roam. I can symphatize that from such different perspective a user had gotten used to a feature which makes it feel like Obsidian is missing something here.
From what I gather, Obsidian was conceived in this thread on the Dynalist forum so the developers were very aware what Roam could(n’t) do and decided to make their own interpretation instead of a 1-1 clone.
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@obsessed I agree with most of what you said. Nevertheless, you say
But seems a lot of people arrived on Obsidian after first having used Roam. I can symphatize that from such different perspective a user had gotten used to a feature which makes it feel like Obsidian is missing something here.
If they took the step to move over from Roam they should realise that Obsidian cannot be the same as Roam. Why did they not stick with Roam and ask for a feature they would really like to have, like they can do here? I know this is probably a contentious statement but I for one do not want Obs to become a Roam clone. Yes, there are interesting features in Roam that could be useful in Obs, but @Caketray mentioned this is not simple. So, fine, let’s leave it at that. I opened a plug-in request for special Connections (offered by nvUltra), but it is very complicated with questionable results, so I have proposed myself to forget about it.
Obs already offers linking to headers between notes, which more than what many note-taking apps offer.
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