To illustrate problems with Sawppy's documentation, I'll use a single component as example: Sawppy wheel axle. There are at least three entirely separate pages relating to the wheel axle:

  1. The page of parts list, telling a builder to buy 8mm metal shaft.
  2. The page for 8mm shaft modification, where I describe how to cut the long shaft into shorter segments. Followed by steps to turn these segments into wheel axles. Other segments were turned into steering shafts, plus those turned into rocker-bogie suspension pivots.
  3. The page for wheel hub assembly, which incorporates a single segment of the 8mm wheel axle shaft.

While these three files were all linked from the index page, there's no obvious way to retrieve the relationship between them in the context of wheel axles. I can manually add links between them, but this is time consuming and perpetually incomplete. Even worse, as the number of relationships grew, it will quickly become a maintenance nightmare.

Thus I started my quest to find a system to document and track these types of relationships without losing (too much) of the advantages of my current system.