We aspire to equip each author with affordances and workflows that make sites whole. Here we consider what it means to be whole and how overuse of the Reference plugin undermines this property.
A site is whole if it serves a purpose on its own having been assembled from original thought and those of others.
A site is made whole by engaging with a giving community and drawing from it pages that advance the purpose.
A community emerges in practice from the attribution in the journals of a site's most valuable pages.
A community declared with intention is best captured with a Roster independent of any present or anticipated pages.
# Harm
A Reference attempts to enlarge a site and build community at once and does neither well. They were added to wiki before better plugins and workflows were discovered.
A Reference mimics a bibliographic citation and with it the assumption of scholarly familiarity with the available literature. This made sense when printing was slow and libraries rare.
A Reference asserts without conveying knowledge.
A Reference dilutes the reader's attention.
A Reference prematurely add neighbors.
A Reference deters further refinement.
# Better
Write pages that say something, with a title that suggests something, and a synopsis that summarizes the something in a way that can be found.
Write pages that move freely. Let pages imply a sites organization without relying on organization for meaning.
Write a welcome with who and what pages that will make sense to a reader exploring twins.
Organize community with Rosters of contributors willing to author sites within the community's norms.
Acknowledge community leadership by delegating and transcluding the Rosters they maintain.
Discover community by searching for items from your best pages. Use the find link to compose these searches.