#1

To what extent do you all create links to pages that you haven’t yet created? Seems like there’s a spectrum from creating a link for every key word you write, to creating links for pages you intend to create (later), to only creating links to pages that you have created or are creating now.

I’m curious what works for folks and what benefits/drawbacks you’ve found.

One specific question for those who link to a lot of uncreated pages, do you end up having links to different wordings of the same idea (such as links to a page called “note writing” and a “note taking” and “making notes”). If so, is it a problem or how do you resolve?

Thanks for any thoughts!

#2

Ever since I figured out that it’s super easy to create links once I’ve created the file (especially using aliases) using the backlinks pane, I’ve tried to avoid creating links to files that don’t exist yet because I’ve discovered that it gets messy if I have [[thing]] and [[things]] (or, say, Egypt and Egyptian) and I have to remember which version I used every time – but if I later create a file Egypt, and alias it to Egyptian, it works fine. But if I accidentally screw up ever and link to Egypt and Egyptian, you can’t merge it later.

These days I only do it if I really need to connect two otherwise unconnected ideas (for example, if Egyptians traded with Ethiopia, who traded with China, and Egypt and China didn’t have any connections between them other than Ethiopia, I might want to create the link to the nonexistent page so that my graph is a little more accurate. But that’s pretty rare.

I used to think I wanted to treat the “dangling links” as a todo list, but realistically, I like creating the note when I need it and not before, so I’ve changed my mind on that front.

Hope this helps
and always remember there’s no one true way

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Importance of naming with zettelkasten IDs?
#3

Thank you! Good food for thought. [[Thing]] and [[Things]] is definitely something I worry about, and I hadn’t realized there would be no way to merge later. At the moment I’m doing a hybrid, without much rhyme or reason, so I’m just interested in perspectives. THANKS!!

#4

I try to avoid linking uncreated notes since I want links to always be meaningful. I also make all uncreated notes red in the graph view so I can easily see if I accidentally make a link to an uncreated note.

#5

To give a perspective from the other side, I use uncreated links a lot in one of my vaults. The vault is a contact list and journal, among other things. I have pages that list contacts by organization, department, relationship, whatever is useful. I also keep meeting notes that refer to people in the meetings, who has action items, and so forth.

A specific example is a page that lists the contacts from a vendor that we use. Each vendor contact’s name is an uncreated link along with their job title, e.g.:

# Company ABC

- [[Amit Patel]], CEO
- [[Jane Smith]], COO
- [[Frank Earnest]], VP of Marketing

When taking meeting notes I can easily refer to these people by typing [[ and any letters in their name, and almost immediately find the name I’m looking for. (Especially useful when I don’t quite remember it right. :slight_smile:) It’s great that this auto-lookup works even though the page doesn’t exist – so long as the link does somewhere in the vault.

# Meeting with ABC

Attendees: [[Jane Smith]] [[Frank Earnest]]

Of course, I could make a proper note for each person, but I don’t like having a bunch of blank notes in my vault. And of course, if I needed to track additional info about a person it’s as easy as clicking their name and typing.

Hope this is helpful.

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