Well, I appreciate that you’re thinking about the problem of linking in general and writing about it. If finding and inserting appropriate links is laborious—well, so is writing. Linking is part of the process—part of the content. You can’t automate it away.
Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.
Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!
Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read in the editor.
Next I have bibliographic information on every source that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and have some information scraped from the page and stored in a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want to add. Another script stores the important information from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my document, for formatting bibliographies in the final version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text from the same source.
The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords, and a few more things. I can select part of my text and hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with properly formatted links and references.
For each notes file corresponding to a resource another keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz graph of this reference network.
I’ve built this up over the years; it’s a mess and no one else should use it. Maybe I’ll clean it up some day. It’s really paying off now for me though: I’m writing a book with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be unmanageable without some kind of system.
I know that there’s Zotero and other systems out there. But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and are somewhat personal.
Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.