Inter-linker consistency in the manual construction of hypertext documents
Jonathan Furner, David J. Ellis, Peter Willett · ACM Computing Surveys · 1999
The creation of hypertext links by manual means is difficult and costly, but is often preferred to automatic methods in attempts to optimize hypertext `quality'.Experiments show, however, that levels of consistency amongst human link-creators---in common with those historically observed amongst human indexers---are generally low and variable, and that the effectiveness of retrieval from manually-constructed hypertexts can be expected to suffer as a result.This finding motivates further comparison both of manual and of automatic methods of link creation.