There are two kinds of page here, and knowing which is which makes the whole site easier to use.
Class pages
Under All Classes, one page per class, in order. Each carries:
- an Agenda — what we did, with links to everything we used
- Things to do before our next class — the homework, as a checklist
Class pages are the narrative: what happened, and when. They hold no explanations at all, which is deliberate.
Reference pages
Everything else — Concepts, Investigations, Exercises, Reference, Tasks, Tutorials, Discussions, Setup — is reference. Each is written once and linked from however many class pages need it.
graph LR D1["Unit 3, Day 5"] --> ST["Stoichiometry"] D2["Unit 3, Day 6"] --> ST D3["Unit 4, Day 5"] --> ST ST --> BL["Backlinks show all three"]
Nobody builds that backlinks list. It is assembled from the links themselves every time the site is rebuilt, which is why linking generously costs nothing now and pays off later.
Why not simply put the explanation on the class page?
Because then the mole would be explained in five places, and correcting an error would mean correcting it five times. In practice it would be corrected once and left wrong four times, and the four stale copies would be indistinguishable from the good one.
So: each idea lives in exactly one page, and everything else links to it. If you ever find the same explanation written out twice on this site, that is a bug, and I would like to know.
The Reference folder does a different job from Concepts
These two get confused, and the difference is worth stating.
| Folder | What is in it | You open it |
|---|---|---|
| Concepts | Explanations — why something is true, and where it stops being true | When you are trying to understand |
| Reference | Tables and rules — the polyatomic ions, the solubility rules, the activity series | When you are trying to do something and need a value |
The Mole explains why a counting unit was needed and how the number was chosen. Significant Figures and Units tells you the rules in the shortest form that is still correct. You want the first one on a Tuesday and the second one in the middle of a calculation, and putting them on the same page would make both worse.
This course leans on its Reference pages much more heavily than Grade 10 did, because chemistry runs on lookup tables in a way that a survey science course does not.
Where your own work fits
The Portfolios folder is the one part of this structure that is yours rather than mine. It follows the same rule: one entry per piece of thinking, written close to the work, linked from wherever it is relevant. See Chemistry Journal.
Which page do I actually want?
“What did we do on Tuesday?” → a class page. “How does that work again?” → a Concepts page. “What is the formula for sulfate?” → a Reference page. “How do I do it?” → a Tutorials page. “When did we cover this?” → open the concept page and read its backlinks.
Next: What This Site Can Do, or Using This Site if you want the short version.