I was reading a blog post today that made me question how often a hyperlink to the same content should appear in a document.
In the post, nearly every reference to HDL (with the exception of one caption) was linked to the same Wikipedia article on HDL. I tend to hover over links as I come across them in documents to see if they provide additional contextual information, or aid in understanding the current document. In this case, I already had opened and skimmed the Wikipedia article when I first came across the link at the start of the document and the repeated linking felt excessive.
I realized thought, that I often do the same thing when creating technical documentation. I do this in case the reader is given a link to a section of a document which uses a term or initialism which might not be widely known, but is explained somewhere else in the document.
Wikipedia seems to take the opposite approach (though this may depend on the author of the article, and I'm unsure if this is something that is enforced). Looking at a few pages there, hyperlinks appear on new terms as they are introduced. If the term is used again in the same context later on in the document, it is in plaintext.
Is there a generally accepted way to approach how often you should link to a document?
