Overlinking

Related concepts

The opposites of overlinking are "null linking" and "underlinking", which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs. This results in reader frustration. Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time) and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but finds they cannot, but rather is required to conduct an extensive search far up near the beginning of the article, in order to locate the only instance of the word or term being linked— or perhaps even to find that it hasn't been linked at all.

Impact

Overlinking may deplete users' attention because it competes with all others, increasing the time of processing all possible choices, and adding extra load on users' working memory (cognitive overload).

References

no:Overlinking

References

1. P. Thruesen, J. Čechák, B. Sezñec, R. Castaño and N. Kanhabua, "[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7840785 To link or not to link: Ranking hyperlinks in Wikipedia using collective attention]", 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Washington, DC, USA, 2016, P. 1709-1718.
2. "The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?".