Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?

† Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

https://wiki.rel8.dev/co-write_a_neobook

A playlist of related index cards from a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten could be considered a playlist that comprises an article or a longer work like a book.

Just as one can create a list of all the paths through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, one could do something similar with linked notes. Ward Cunningham has done something similar to this programmatically with the idea of a Markov monkey.

TiddlyWiki was inspired by @WardCunningham's glorious idea of wiki – more than anything by the way that wiki makes linking be part of the punctuation of writing. https://t.co/pLPfYcCJY2

— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022

http://ratfactor.com/cards/cards-inspiration

While his collection of public notes is extremely limited, Dave Gauer does provide a list of his inspiration and precursors mostly focusing on Soren Bjornstad's influence as well as Ward Cunningham's wiki.c2.com site and inspiration from Umberto Eco and Vladimir Nabokov.

Reply to Nick Milo:

Ward Cunningham may have been using a similar UI prior to it for other projects, but he unveiled the Smallest Federated Wiki at IndieWeb Camp 2011 in late June: https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki. I don't have a receipt to prove it, but I have to suspect that Andy's version was certainly influenced by Cunningham's work.

Mike Caulfield, subsequent author of the influential The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, Iterated on the Smallest Federated Wiki and created a WordPress-based plugin shortly thereafter called Wikity that used some of the card-based UI that Obsidian comes with out of the box.

Both had some early influence on the UI-based research that the IndieWeb space has done since. For those interested, there's also a sub-group within it focusing on digital gardens, commonplace books, Zettelkasten, etc. that can be found here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

This is a phenomenally important UX insight and affordance that has become a foundation of how all modern wiki-linking knowledge graph tools work today. Kudos to Ward for this!