How I use wiki-links and aliases

Following Jim’s (@BLUEFROG) advice, I decided to write a little bit about how I use wiki-links and aliases since it could perhaps inspire new ideas in other users. I intend to write something more through some other time, but for now, here is a gist of it.


In my PhD work, I deal all the time with Ancient Greek texts - most of them by Aristotle. Aristotle’s thinking is both deep and diverse; at times also very difficult. Usually you need to get a grip on some of the main concepts he builds his thinking around before it all starts to make sense. To help me in this job, I try to maintain a glossary that I am always updating and improving. For each main concept, I have a separate markdown file with a definition, some references from the corpus where this concept is discussed and perhaps even a transcription from the dictionary entry of the term.

This is especially helpful when I do my reading in DEVONthink and have WikiLinks turned on and set to automatic.

Now, to make sure I spot these concepts every time - and this is no small feat, considering that Greek is an inflected language and the same concept or verb may show up in variety of different forms - I get a special help from my favorite DT feature: aliases.

It is only a matter of finding out the known forms for a particular concept and importing them into DT. I will not go into details about how I get this done, since it involves a third-party software. I will only say that is it a great help the fact that the terms (to be used as aliases) need only to be in a comma separated string. (In case anyone is interested, let me know and I will be happy to talk about it). Now, after I have the aliases in place, I can rest assured that I will never miss an occurrence of some important concept and also that I won’t need to go looking for my notes in case one of the concepts pops-up.

After a little while doing this, here is what I am reading looks like:

Certainly easier than it was before :slightly_smiling_face:


You might want to take a look at pt. 2 and pt. 3.

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This is very interesting. Thank you.

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Hi @Bernardo_V, using aliases for morphological changes is a great idea. Can you share some more about your full process? I’d be very interested.

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Fantastic @Bernardo_V! This is a really interesting use case and a great example of exploiting aliases in a really nuanced and creative way.
Bravo!

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I have two questions on using aliases as link:
(1) If two/more items just happen to contain the same aliases (by accident or intended) will wiki-link simply pull the first item found?
(2) Is there any specification on aliases for being able to use as wiki-link? For example, I find that DT3 can recognise aliases “AP.001” as link but not “P.001”.

Thanks in advance

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Very interesting, thanks for sharing! – and admittedly, for bringing this to my attention in the first place. I’ll look into this.

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Gladly! I will open another thread and post the link here

Thank you, Jim @BLUEFROG. Bravo to you and the whole DT team for putting together such a great piece of software!

@darrylmy, I finally posted the tools I used to come-up with the aliases in the right place. I posted them here. If you have any questions left, please let me know!

@Bernardo_V, thanks so much for the series; this is going to help me a lot! Looks like I’m going to have to update my old license for KM!

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I am happy to know it might have of service to you!