{"id":554,"date":"2021-11-08T11:04:37","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T16:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/etiennefd.com\/dgm\/?p=554"},"modified":"2021-11-08T11:04:37","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T16:04:37","slug":"science-style-guide-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/etiennefd.com\/dgm\/science-style-guide-links\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Style Guide: Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of my ongoing\u00a0scientific style guideline series<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Wikipedia and start reading an article on some topic you don’t know much about. For example, the umami taste<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chances are that by the end of the first few paragraph, you will have clicked on several links, either because they referred to terms you didn’t know (glutamate<\/a>,\u00a0inosine monophosphate<\/a>), or because you were curious (what does Wikipedia have to say about the five basic tastes<\/a>?). Now these links might be open in new tabs for you to check later. Or maybe you’ve already given up reading the original umami article, and are now exploring some new rabbit hole (e.g. the Scoville scale of spiciness<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Wikipedia is a great resource for many reasons, but one of them is this constant hyperlinking to other relevant Wikipedia articles. This has a major advantage: it allows the reader to create their own reading experience<\/strong>. Advanced readers on some topic can keep reading without having to go through the basics they already know. Beginner readers can look up technical terms easily. Wikipedia is a choose-your-own-adventure book, where you can wander according to your own character level.<\/p>\n

Links are even an answer to some degree to the four-way tradeoff I wrote about here<\/a>. It’s difficult to write something that is clear, brief, complex, and information-rich. But Wikipedia articles come closer to the golden middle, and that’s thanks to links. With no need to explain every difficult term directly in the text, articles can be more brief without sacrificing clarity. By packaging complex information in other articles, and showing only the link, Wikipedia articles can contain more complexity and richness of information.<\/p>\n

(The reason it doesn’t falsify my four-way tradeoff theory is that Wikipedia as a whole<\/em> cannot be called succinct. To understand a topic well, you still have to read a lot of articles. But Wikipedia packages this information in relatively brief articles. In other words, information architecture is a pretty good solution to the tradeoff.)<\/p>\n

Links make matters easier to readers, but they also help writers. You don’t have to do as much guessing about what your audience knows; your audience will decide for themselves. And you can just reuse existing information written by others.<\/p>\n

This suggests that our two principles<\/a> are satisfied:<\/p>\n