In wiki culture, a ghost link (sometimes called a “red link” or “zombie node”) is a reference to a page that does not exist yet. It is not an error — it is an intentional signal that a concept has been identified as worth writing about.
In a Deep Context Architecture garden, ghost links serve as planning tools. When a node references [[Concept Name]] and no node by that name exists anywhere — not in the patch, not in the source garden — the ghost link marks a gap in the knowledge graph. The concept has been named and connected to other ideas through predicates, but no one has written the node yet.
The gardening metaphor: a ghost link is a stake in the ground marking where something should be planted. The stake shows the gardener’s intention — this is where a pattern, model, or inquiry should grow — without committing to the planting yet.
Ghost links are visually distinct: they render as plain, non-clickable text with [[brackets]]. This distinguishes them from grafted nodes (clickable, no marker) and upstream nodes (clickable, with ↑ marker).
A garden can track ghost links to prioritize what to write next. Nodes with the most incoming ghost links — the most predicates pointing to something that doesn’t exist yet — are candidates for early creation. The ghost link count is a measure of how much the existing graph expects a concept to be developed.