I think the Bush essay is totally fascinating. I have never seen it before and it's amazing to think it was written such a long time ago. However, both it and the Federated Wiki both miss an important part of the how textual information is created and linked on the web, by talking about "articles". In the essay the user reads through articles and links between articles, while in wiki systems the contributors' goal is usually to build an article. IMHO the focus on creating articles is the cause of a great many problems on wiki systems, and it also influences the discussion of linking.<p>Taking Wikipedia as an example, readers build up an article piece by piece to create a long text article. However, much of the information inside the article can be better represented as data. Articles are rigid, and the text inside them cannot be manipulated easily. For example, instead of a long article, a biography can be represented as a timeline of events. That timeline of events (as data) can then be manipulated (filtered and sorted) by the end user to give whatever view they want. It's not just a matter of following a trail (as the Bush text says), but of collecting the information as you go.<p>Instead of acting as a database of facts or events, Wikipedia acts like a book (a paper encyclopedia). Sure it has interlinked pages, but that's where it stops. Because it acts like a book it seems acceptable to have its external links represented as footnotes in a reference section under the main text. Federated wiki runs into the same problem too because it's focus is also on articles -- the result of collaboration is a page that cannot act as data.<p>But the web is not a book and both articles and footnotes (and lack of other multimedia features) are not native to the way it functions. I think there are many better solutions to this problem than going back to footnotes. The medium is the message and solutions need to stop trying to make the web work like a book, but to make it work for the web.<p>I have been working on much of the above on my site. I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source link on the <i>verbs</i> in the text, while internal linking is handled by nouns. <a href="http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-links/" rel="nofollow">http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-links/</a>