A personal glossary system can be a powerful way to help writers write less but to simultaneously communicate more.
A good example is an author writing about going ‘to work’ and then defining what the author’s work is, for future writing where this does not need to be repeated. It brings up the immediate question of what happens when the author changes their work? This may well be an intractable problem but having both the date of creation of the glossary term and a link to an online master glossary where terms can be checked can be a useful tool. At the very least this shows–unless the author made a mistake in not updating the term, where the author was working at the point when the document was published.
Questions come up with regularity as to whether the glossary should automatically tag text on export and the answer seems to be that showing the document with all suggested tags shown with the first sentence of the definition highlighted in a colour to allow the author to say no with a click, and to manually add with a click.
The glossary should follow the document, not live on a server, that much is clear, but only as instantiations, not as a master list. This should then be possible with WordPress as host for the terms, with an ability for the user to update definitions, with a trail by default or as corrections if the user so wishes.
This is a basic hypertext and it can be read in documents or spread out in graphs and is what I would like to tackle next, if I can ever get visual-meta well enough into the world to focus on this :-)
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