Here’s is one interesting question, which seems a bit controversial to me.
Do I need to aggressively interlink my own content?
I’ve been noticing that people very often miss content related to what they read.
I know that the platform embeds a lot of links everywhere: at the bottom of a topic, in the “related topics” area, and in the beginning of a topic, listing other topics which links to it. However, it seems that people often miss / ignore those links.
The question is, should we invest any time in building links to our own content from our own content, just like wikipedia does?
Anyone has experience with interlinking? Please share your practice and observations.
I link to anything I think is relevant, everywhere. Not just my forums.
I write for the web, and any given piece of content can be processed in a variety of ways. Maybe RSS (I follow a lot of Discourse this way). Maybe email. I want to provide all the context I need.
I even have a canned reply to encourage users to link to that other post they are referring to:
Hint: If you refer to some other post on this forum, it would be great if you could provide a link to that post.
The link will automatically be visible from both sides (i.e. there will also be a link back from the post you’re linking to). Those links will make it much easier for people to navigate the forum and find relevant information.
My strong recommendation is to interlink very aggressively any canonical content. Medium term we do plan to give additional search weight to topics with lots of internal links.
So, for example:
If someone asks “How do you make frogs jump”
And you have a topic that you want everyone to find: “The physics of frog jumping”
Sorry, I missed that: no, I usually post that publicly to facilitate learning by everyone. But, of course, it depends on your community. In some communities people may be offended if they are educated publicly. That’s why I try to make it sound like a useful hint rather than teaching.
Looking forward to that! What does “medium term” mean? Is this anywhere on the roadmap yet?
