How to Use Wikilinks

Wikilinks are a powerful feature of digital gardens that allow you to create connections between notes. They’re a simple way to link to other notes in your garden, making it easy to navigate and discover related ideas.

What Are Wikilinks?

Wikilinks (also called bidirectional links) are a special type of link that uses double square brackets to reference another note. For example, note-title creates a link to a note with the title “note-title”.

What makes wikilinks special is that they create a two-way connection:

1. The link in your current note points to the target note
2. The target note automatically shows a “backlink” pointing back to your current note

This bidirectional nature helps build a network of interconnected ideas.

How to Create Wikilinks

Creating wikilinks in your digital garden is simple:

1. Identify a concept or idea that should link to another note
2. Surround the concept with double square brackets: like this
3. The text inside the brackets will be used to find or create the target note

Examples

This is a link to [[welcome-to-my-digital-garden]].

I'm learning about the [[zettelkasten-method]] for note-taking.

Check out this book: [[Book: How to Take Smart Notes]].

Best Practices for Wikilinks

To get the most out of wikilinks in your digital garden:

1. Link Liberally

Don’t be shy about creating links. The more connections you make, the richer your garden becomes. If you mention a concept that has its own note (or should have its own note), link to it.

2. Use Consistent Naming

Try to be consistent in how you name your notes and how you reference them. This makes it easier to create and maintain links.

3. Create Links Before Notes

You can create wikilinks to notes that don’t exist yet. This is a great way to identify gaps in your garden that you might want to fill later.

4. Review Backlinks

Regularly review the backlinks section of your notes to discover unexpected connections and to see how ideas relate to each other.

5. Link to Books

To link to a book note, use the format [[Book: How to Take Smart Notes]]. This helps distinguish book notes from regular notes.

Wikilinks vs. Traditional Links

Related Notes

• [[welcome-to-my-digital-garden]]
• [[digital-garden-philosophy]]
• [[networked-thought]]