Articles (or writing in general) is probably best structured as a Directed Acyclic Graph, rather than linearly. At each point in the article, there may be multiple possible lines to pursue, or “sidenotes”.
I say “directed acyclic graph” rather than “tree”, because it may be natural as thinking of paths as joining back at some point, especially if certain threads are optional.
One may also construct an “And-Or tree” to allow multiple versions of the article preferred by conflicting writers, which may then be voted on with some mechanism. These votes can be used to define values to each vertex, and people can read the tree with their own search algorithm*.
A whole wiki may be constructed as one giant DAG, with each article being sub-components.
*well, realistically nobody would actually just be following a search algorithm blindly/reading a linear article linearly (since straitjacketing yourself with prerequisites is never a good idea), but you know, as a general guide to structure.
(idea came from LLM conversations, which often take this form—of pursuing various lines of questioning then backtracking to a previous message)
Why best structured? What quality or cause of reader-comprehension do you think non-linearity in this particular forking format maximizes?
Also aren’t most articles written with a singular or central proposition in mind (Gian Carlo Rota said that every lecture should say one thing, Quintillian advised all speeches to have one ‘basis’), for which all paragraphs essentially converge on that as a conclusion?
Articles (or writing in general) is probably best structured as a Directed Acyclic Graph, rather than linearly. At each point in the article, there may be multiple possible lines to pursue, or “sidenotes”.
I say “directed acyclic graph” rather than “tree”, because it may be natural as thinking of paths as joining back at some point, especially if certain threads are optional.
One may also construct an “And-Or tree” to allow multiple versions of the article preferred by conflicting writers, which may then be voted on with some mechanism. These votes can be used to define values to each vertex, and people can read the tree with their own search algorithm*.
A whole wiki may be constructed as one giant DAG, with each article being sub-components.
*well, realistically nobody would actually just be following a search algorithm blindly/reading a linear article linearly (since straitjacketing yourself with prerequisites is never a good idea), but you know, as a general guide to structure.
(idea came from LLM conversations, which often take this form—of pursuing various lines of questioning then backtracking to a previous message)
Why best structured? What quality or cause of reader-comprehension do you think non-linearity in this particular forking format maximizes?
Also aren’t most articles written with a singular or central proposition in mind (Gian Carlo Rota said that every lecture should say one thing, Quintillian advised all speeches to have one ‘basis’), for which all paragraphs essentially converge on that as a conclusion?