Improve backlink (unlinked mention) recognition, by allowing thoughts to have aliases
Sometimes you have thoughts that have some formal longer name, like there are companies named "International Consolidated Airlines Group SA" in real life. But when you refer to it in your notes with a shorter name, the reference won't be recognized.
Now, you don't want to fully write out this name each time, but you also don't want to manually create a link each time you write shorter version like "ICAG SA", not only would that be a work-around, often you actually don't want to create a clickable link at all and just leave it with a dotted underline, but it will still register on the other node as an 'Unlinked Mention'. Or at least you'd want to, but currently, without aliases, this is not the case.
Solution:
Have an input between Label and the buttons for Typo and Tags, where you can add aliases which are then recognized throughout the plex.
Workaround:
Under the 'formal' thought, create a child thought for each nick name. This works, but obviously pollutes your plex and requires an extra click. Also, doesn't really work as intended for Unlinked Mentions. The idea is to create a linked brain where your potentially relevant data, such as Unlinked Mentions, presents itself to you in meaningful ways. Having child nodes for aliases moves this type of data out of sight.
(original thread: https://forums.thebrain.com/post/it-would-be-really-helpful-to-have-aliases-8384-13370707)
Benny Bottema
shared this idea
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A P commented
I use labels for my alias. I rarely have more than one alias.
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Marc A. Kastner
commented
I work in Japan and thus often deal with different writing systems (i.e., same name in English and in Japanese characters). In Obsidian it has been tremendously useful to have note names with English writing but add the Japanese writing as an alias for people names, company names, and sometimes events etc. I'd love to be able to do this in TB too.
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Anonymous
commented
Same with names of people "John Smith" and/or "Smith, John" and/or "John H Smith" would like to be linked as same. The same issue with company names as detailed here. Company , and Company LLC are the same. Also same account numbers are presented "1234567890" or "123-4567890" and/or "123-4567-890" are the same however backlinks don't find it. I have resorted to making duplicate thoughts with the name variants, makes a mess.
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Gene Rugg commented
Agreed.
More examples of useful automatic links;
- References to previous married and changed names;
- context specific nicknames for people
- common abbreviations for formal product names (like M365 <> Microsoft 365 Business Premium)
- common names for botanical and scientific classification
- spelling varients - like programming 'color' vs local 'colour'Obviously, this page has a long list of compelling reasons and reasons when not to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect
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Max Lin Worm
commented
I've found a Workaround, using the comma titles feature, in an undocumented way. So if you have a thought titled "International Consolidated Airlines Group SA, ICAG SA, ICAG, International Consolidated Airlines Group", it would find unlinked mentions for "International Consolidated Airlines Group", "International Consolidated Airlines Group SA", "ICAG SA" and "ICAG".
Works kind like aliases, except they have to all be in the note title and when you use a manual link they're all included in the "anchor text".