Bringing in the idea of group graphs complicates things, I think. There are a million ways that groups might work together, and it will create all kinds of issues with versioning, page title conflicts, etc. that may or may not have to do with aliases. I think it makes more sense to settle this concept for a single-user graph first and then adapt.
The issue is not whether you should be using aliases for something or not, the issue is what does the concept of aliases mean. IMO, the current system is not an alias system. It is something else, because it doesn’t do all and only what I described in my first post. You are using the term “alias” to mean something that is not what I mean, and it is not clear to me exactly what functionality defines an alias system for you. Importantly, the current system is not something that is more flexible in comparison to my proposal. It is just different. It allows and disallows different things than the system I’m proposing. What I am not understanding is what you think you are gaining with the current “separate pages” system.
Let me clarify a few terms. Say a page has: (1) the page name or title, (2) frontmatter, (3) what I am calling the page “content”, by which I mean all content except for the page title and frontmatter. Maybe you would prefer that I call (3) page text or page blocks. And call the system I’m proposing a “single page” system (one page, multiple aliases that link to that page) and your system / the current system a “separate page” system (each alias has its own page, but aliases link to each other and have some other functionality that is still not clear to me).
You write:
Here we are in agreement, and my proposal would do this. Call “mouse” the source page and “mice” the alias. In my system and your system (I think), all mentions of either “mouse” or “mice” would show up as either linked or unlinked references on page “mouse”.
What I don’t want is for content from “mouse” and “mice” to differ. Do you? If so, why? Why would you want to have content on page “苹果” that is not on page “apple” and vice-versa? If “apple” and “苹果” are literally the same concept for you, then put the content relating to them on one page. If they are slightly different concepts, have 2 pages and link them. You can connect the information related to those terms easily using page embeds, queries, or regular links.
You wrote:
I don’t see why single page is more cumbersome than separate page. With a single page system, you are not creating a united page every time. You are just creating a page and very occasionally adding an alias to that page when you realize that you want to link to it with “mice” instead of “mouse”. The page will still show unlinked references to “mice” on the page “mouse”. I understand that maybe you already have some separate pages that you will need to consolidate. That’s a one-time thing, I think. In the future, if you have a page “apple” when you are typing in Chinese and write “苹果” you will think to link it to the existing apple page and will add the alias, just as I will when writing “mice” and realizing that I want to link to page “mouse”.
In contrast, in a separate page system, I cannot trust that the content from page “mice” matches the content on page “mouse” and I will need to repeatedly check which is the “main” page when linking and manually sync page content over and over when working with older notes to make sure I’m not missing anything. Do you really want to be reading back and forth between pages “苹果” and “apple” in 2 years when you go back to them to see if there was any important info in “apple” that’s not in "“苹果” ? That’s what separate pages will force. It might not seem like a big deal now, but when you are building a lifetime notetaking system and start visiting notes months or years after the fact, it will become a nightmare.
BOTH systems will have all blocks that reference “apple” listed on the page “苹果” (or vice-versa), the only difference is that your way has these 2 terms as separate pages and my way has them as one combined page. Something is lost by keeping these as 2 separate pages, but what are you gaining by keeping these as separate rather than one page?
You are saying that people can use aliases in their own way, but the current system is not letting people use it in their own way, because it prevents me from using the term “mice” to link to the content on page “mouse”. I know that, in your mind, your way is more flexible because you are currently using it to do something that my proposed system would not let you do. There are many other ways to do what you are currently trying to do, but you are using one that might be changed. So you think your way offers additional functionality. But it actually offers different functionality, not additional functionality, and is thus not more flexible. It is just different. It does not provide the functionality of giving users the ability to easily refer to the same page with different names, which is the problem that I think most people are looking to solve with aliases.
The productivists post you put up, like me and Obsidian, speaks of aliases as “page title synonyms” - meaning the page content is the same, and only the links to page titles differ. The single page system addresses all of the concerns listed in those posts.