Wikipedia links thought harmful

Ploum, in support of Gemini, questions the idea of hyperlinks:

  Take any book in your library. Go through pages. No formatting except than titles. Every picture is there for a strong reason. No funny meme. Yes, there are links (those are called ‘footnotes’ in a book) and it is widely known that a book with too much footnote is hard to read. As soon as I realise that footnotes in a book are more than simple sources, I feel betrayed. Either I read them, which is cumbersome or I ignore them and feel I’m missing something.

  Writing is hard because you never know how people will understand what you are trying to convey. They add their own culture, their own experience. But at least, there’s an agreement about the meaning of words. As soon as you add formatting, images or complex structuring, you add information for which there’s clearly no shared nor agreed meaning. You add pure noise to the music, hoping to make it louder.

  Ploum (2022-04-25). Why Gemini is Essential

Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon is less profound in a printed encyclopaedia, where there are cross-references, but restrained. (Overgeneralization warning: I only read Encyclopedia of China, where most items have only one reference in their first sentences and readers should be attentive to find a cross-reference.) The ADHD-style hyperlinking is an internet invention.

Marginalia Encyclopedia is a reformatted Wikipedia extracting inline links from text, a convention for alleged typography of printed books.