references are enriched links

A link plus context, annotations perhaps, notes…a ROAM_REF page knows what it wants to be, which is:

• a lossy cache hit for a resource in case all you need is to remind yourself of what a thing is

• a thunk for your linking, so that every link that points to an upstream goes through a node you control (so you can accrete your own context)

  Come to think of it, both of these are types of thunk.

The best implementation I've ever seen of this is on painscience.com, which I continue to lust after and will probably end up reimplementing. Also notable is gwern.net.