Link concepts, not coordinates

A link points at a meaning, not at a place — and links are made generously.

A coordinate is where a thing currently sits: a file path, a folder, a section number, a chapter that may be renumbered next month. A concept is what the thing is. Link to the concept, and the link keeps meaning after the reorganization; link to the coordinate, and you have written a footnote that will quietly rot.

The deeper reason is topological rather than clerical. Every link is an assertion that these two meanings are related, and the web of those assertions is the shape of the knowledge — the part a reader navigates and an agent traverses. Coordinates carry no such assertion. They tell you where to walk; they do not tell you why.

So links are made generously. A page that mentions three related concepts and links none of them has hidden three edges of the map. Naming a concept with a link before its page exists is not an error: it creates the topology first and marks where writing is owed. The complementary caution is that whatever page eventually stands at that name becomes the meaning of every link already pointing to it, so a thin page at a large name does real damage.

Two small habits follow. Name the concept in the singular, so one page answers to one thing rather than to a plural and its variants. And where a link must cross into another sovereign body of work, qualify it by its source rather than leaving a bare name that will resolve to the wrong thing.

Also called: link generously, Link to the Concept Not the Coordinate Stands on: The LIØNSBERG Book of Conventions · The Incipient Link · Pattern Opens onto: Semantic Capture · One canonical home per concept · Wiki Is Primary And Standalone · Every Page Lives Within A Volume · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon · An address In play: beyond Sources: Link to the Concept, Not the Coordinate (draft) · The LIØNSBERG Book of Conventions (canon-grade for its role) · Semantic Capture (draft) · Name the Concept in the Singular (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Link to the Concept, Not the Coordinate Open: the convention was written for one vault, where a bare link resolves inside it. Nothing yet says how a link should be written when it must reach a concept held in another body's canon.