langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-04-22-4

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comment-2002-04-22-4

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 8278 days AGO

As usual the comments are helpful, and I will have to spell out my further remarks in a form longer than would be appropriate here. But, let me give a couple of answers in passing.

First, to Alex, IME the density of linkage has too often been _both_ too little, on many pages, and too dense on most other pages. Only rarely---and then by chance---was it a tolerable number. And on my Wiki, the Visual Tour graphs have alwas focussed on (again IMO) the most boring aspects of what was there. This is proably an artifact of the rule that `paints' tour graphs based on `most linked' nodes. The may be most linked, but they also seem to be `most boring'.

To Chris, I'm haven't found any characterizations of people or problems that lets me predict whether this kind of formulation will be useful _in advance_. Of course I won't, and can't, dispute what someone else will prove to find useful.

A further, and it seems to me potentially more profound, problem is that the `links' are actually `typed' but this is rather completely lost in the visualizations. A bunch of items may be linked to a date by `occurred on' links, but this may not add much to our `picture'. Worse, `Hates Cobol and never uses it, but loves Perl and uses it everyday' may end up with similar looking links to both Cobol and Perl, while the reality might be better shown by suppressing any link to Cobol.

What I am waiting for, I guess, are some credible stories about things that people have actually used these technologies to `discover'. What I tend to hear, I guess, is stories of `how nice it will be' (mindful of the old story of the thrice-married virgin that was so popular in the early days of computers). While I don't doubt that some people may have their `thinking helped' by such technologies, unless there are more concrete reports, I tend to treat them the same way I do report of religious inspiration: I don't doubt them, but I don't find them very useful for guiding myself or others either.