Feature Request:Weighted Links
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zim |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I am using Zim to organize my research for my book. I am currently populating it with text files of all the resources (books, articles, journal papers, lectures, etc.) I've accumulated over the years, along with my notes and drafts. I'm hoping I will be able to analyze my knowledge pool by graphing the link structure. I may find associations I hadn't recognized :)
However, a common problem in academia is the potential to build a theory on findings that are flawed, p-hacked, or just unconfirmed. While corrections and retractions are published, there are rarely mechanisms for alerting people using sources that draw on the discredited source.
If I could request/create exactly what I needed, it would be the ability to assign confidence estimates to both pages (the studies themselves) and the links between pages (possible implications of the studies). Ideally, I'd be able to create arbitrarily many confidence tags for each page and link (reliability of source, soundness of research methods, p-value of results, personal affinity, etc). This would allow me to try to differentiate between findings that are genuinely weak and those I just disagree with. The estimates would be editable. If new studies corroborate or contradict the original findings, I can update the level of confidence for that particular page.
The link estimates could be included in the Edit Link widget, while the page estimates might need an addon like the Table of Contents widget or the Insert Table widget.
The only use which I'm currently envisioning is projecting this metadata into graphs to find the strongest lines of reasoning and "paths of least controversy". This could also highlight weaknesses in my arguments so I can see where I need to do further research or reevaluate my analysis. I imagine there could be many other uses for this kind of weighted linking.
It's been ten years since I worked with code, but I'd be willing to relearn in order to create this functionality. However, it would certainly be helpful if someone more familiar with the software could give me an estimate of the potential difficulty.
Thanks all.
