I utilize links to non-existent notes extensively—perhaps more so than regular links. My most common use case is wrapping any mentions of media (books, movies, games etc.) and creator names in wikilink syntax. Strange New Worlds (an amazing plugin with an amazing name!) will then show a counter next to each such link. Hovering over that counter will show all the places from across the vault where the link resides—and that’s even before a proper note is created!
But the problem I ran into is this:
For a link to be unresolved, there must not exist a note in the vault with the same exact name.
Let’s say I want to create a link for [[John Smith]] but for whatever reason there’s a note with such title in my vault already. Now I need to find a way to make the link unique. Fine, let’s use a designated symbol for this purpose:[[~John Smith]]. I don’t like how it looks but whatever. Let’s say, then, the note [[John Smith]] gets renamed or deleted some time later, and I come across a John Smith again, having long forgotten that at some point it wasn’t a unique name. I now make it [[John Smith]]—the link is unresolved, and I go on about my day. But now there are two separate links that should be one!
The classical way to deal with that is a disambiguation page. So you start out making links to “John Smith”, and at some point you make a page on this actor(?). Then later on you discover that “John Smith” is also a singer (and not just an actor).
You then take the time to make the pages “John Smith (actor)” and “John Smith (singer)”, and let the “John Smith” be an intermediate page linking to both of the other two pages.
Now in due tine you can rework your vault to update the links to go directly to the precise page you want them to link to, or just let them continue to go to the disambiguation page.
Ah, the Wikipedia way! Good thinking. Potential drawbacks I foresee are:
If I use the same disambiguation link for two distinct things, the Strange New Worlds counter can be misleading, and the backlink list messy.
The disambiguation link being resolved may mislead me into believing that it links to a proper note.
Another approach that I’m also considering is this:
When the goal is to create an unresolved link but there exists a note in the vault with that title already, prepend the unresolved link with ~.
When creating an unresolved link, pay attention to the auto-suggester in the case of there existing an unresolved link with prepended ~. If it shows up, use it instead.
I’m thinking you’ll never know which is what link if you use a character to distinguish them. Using a disambiguation page will make the counters, one for the disambiguation, and for each of the two (or more) correct pages.
And it’s up to you to differentiate them when you encounter them later on. My thinking is that it’ll be better to have that disambiguation page, since if you end up in that page when following a link you’ll know where you came from and what you expected. Aka you could potentially correct, and make the link specific to the correct page.
Of course ideally that would mean you should aim for zero links to the disambiguation page, but it wouldn’t hurt your vault, I believe, if an imprecise link leads to a disambiguation page. It’ll help illustrate the imprecision (if that’s a word).
Took the words out of my mouth. Hey, the suggestions weren’t half bad. (Genuinely. Though the last two don’t make much sense to me.) So go easy on the ban hammer!
