Seeking poetry in hard links

How do you choose your hard links?

Do you choose carefully the words that you put between brackets?

Do you prefer to give your writeup a consistent look with evenly distributed hard links?

Is there a second level of meaning in the distribution of your hard links?

I ask myself those questions every time I am creating a hard link. It is not that I use the topography of hard links to judge writeups. Of course every writeup should have well placed hard links, but it is hard to find the right way to hard link.

Hard links can say a lot about users. If every hard link has his node, that is, they aren’t broken, maybe you’re in front of a very careful noder, or maybe a conservative one. Masking hard links with pipes is a sure sign of noding with care, and perhaps irony or playful noding. Sometimes, hard links can be used to concisely resume what’s in a node, and sometimes it is clear that hard links were just an afterthought.

It doesn’t matter what you were trying to say when you decided which words, letters or sentences were put between brackets, because someone else is going to decide it for you. As it happens in poetry, when you write for you through the eyes of the others, hard links are on their own when you hit the “submit” button.

There are other quasi-poetic techniques at a hard linker's disposal as well. One which you could use regularly is subliminal linking. While hard links should be made to provide readers easy access to related information, it's possible to send them to meaningless pages as well.

Now me, I don't recommend this. But the effect is subtle. All the links in the writeup can be used together to form a complete idea, which you normally wouldn't register in your conscious mind. Such attempts to cash in on Everything's linking technology isn't proper style, and probably isn't morally right either. It's probably just as well that I can't think of any noders engaging in this duplicitous practice, now or ever.