I’m curious if anybody has had forward linking and backward linking “click” for them in a way similar to inversion of control in software engineering and if so, what’s your rule? I have a hard time knowing what I should include as forward or backward links.
My current approach is add forward links whenever I feel they’re relevant, and don’t worry about maintaining a clear structure of forward and backward links. In other words, forward links = whatever comes to mind, backward links = emergent relationships.
To me, a large downside of that approach is that it creates a mess. E.g., a note named Observer.md that is about Observer pattern may be cluttered with links that are relevant to Observer pattern but aren’t about Observer pattern itself.
One approach I’ve taken is including a Links heading that includes links that are relevant. Another approach is only forward linking to two original, atomic notes. E.g. if there’s notes A.md and B.md, and I want to make a link between them, I may make a note C.md that forward links to both A.md and B.md.
When looking at a note, I often want to be able to view what’s relevant but it becomes messy. I haven’t really come up with a perfect solution and I don’t think there is one but I wanted to ask if anyone else has something that works well for them.
P.S. I understand that linking is central in PKM and I have gone through some resources to try to find what people think about forward and backward linking. The resources I went through seemed to focus on links in general (and how they relate to tagging and querying) and not the role of forward and backward linking.