Where did Ward's Wiki go?

[Skip Sailors]

In the beginning there was Ward's Wiki.  Pages that were not yet witten could be referenced.  Documents for complex subjects were created in the process of discovering the complexity, and were, in fact, useful tools to help developers track and manage emergent understanding.  Using a simple syntactic trick, a creator could record the phantom of an idea that would need consideration without having to break out of the idea currently on the front of mind.

This, for me, has always been the fundamental value of wikis, that they support emergent ideas with simple syntax and clear signals and navigation to what remains undone.

The latest implementation of that in Confluence is the [Title]()\n trick that would create a link to an undefined page, that when I clicked on later would invoke the Create for the page that was already linked in the parent.  Today I pulled this trick, and it didn't work, and somehow Rovo got involved, and tried to create a whole tome of content from the title that had pretty much nothing to do with what I was going for in the title.  After some discussion with Rovo, it said that linking to pages that haven't been written yet has been removed from Confluence.  That would mean to me that the primary value proposition of Confluence for me has been removed.  This means I would have to reevaluate Confluence as a CMS, not an authoring tool.  Is it better than SharePoint or OneDrive or Drupal, or a file manager, vi, and an apache server?

I have to hope that Rovo is misinformed, and that this fundamental creative tool hasn't been removed from Confluence.  What is the current support for accidental and placeholder linking for later creation of pages?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Skip Sailors 

Are you putting literally \n at the end of the line of text?

In my Confluence Cloud instance while editing a page if I type in

[placeholder page name]()

...and then hit the Enter key then the text is converted to a link that does a lozenge next to it saying "undefined".

If I then save the page I see the same link and lozenge.

If I then click the link a new page editor opens with placeholder page name as the name of the page.

Alternately you can use the /create command mentioned in the following comment on another post.

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-questions/Create-new-page-with-adding-a-link/qaa-p/2957873#M335709

[Skip Sailors]

No, I am not adding a literal x0A after the text.  I meant that as I enter in the editor the title in a box and then empty parens, and hit the enter key to create the undefined ink.

[Trudy Claspill]

Thanks for the clarification.

The functionality still works in my Free Confluence instance.

It is still called out in the Atlassian documentation here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-links-and-anchors/#Create-and-link-to-an-undefined-placeholder-page

It shouldn't make a difference but I'm using Chrome as my browser and an Incognito window.

Did you also try the /create command?

[Skip Sailors]

When I do this, I also get a link with a lozenge that says undefined.  I save the page.  When I click the link I don't see a new page editor. I see a ship lost at sea, and a message,

  We couldn’t find what you’re looking for
  It may have been deleted, the URL could have a typo in it, or you may need to log in to    view it.

  Go home

[Skip Sailors]

I had not seen the /create command before.  That might be a new way to get this.

[Skip Sailors]

The /create will serve.  Thank you.

[Trudy Claspill]

Were first publishing the page in which you used [Title]() before trying to click the link? Or were you clicking it while still in Edit mode for the main page?

[Skip Sailors]

When I first tried [Title]() and enter, I then saved the page, and then clicked on the link in the saved page, and that is when I got the message that the linked page could not be found.