Ambiguous documentation on adding nodes to terms

I'm wondering if there is some relevant functionality that was removed from the module between 4.7x and 5.x. This page written by Stephen Winters describes a method to achieve multi-page glossary descriptions by attaching nodes to terms, but it was written for the Drupal 4.7x-compatible Glossary module. The relevant text on that never-finished page:

Full Page Definitions, you can attach full page (or multiple pages) of descriptions to any, or all, of the glossary terms. (see instructions for this at the bottom). If you have attached any full pages to any glossary term, the pop up definition will still work, but when you click on the word, you will be taken to the full page descriptions instead of to the glossary page. If you have multiple pages attached to the glossary term, then you will be shown the teasers of all the definition pages. You can then choose to look at any of those pages.

...

Do you want to allow any registered user to add full page definitions to the glossary, or do you want only specific persons to have this ability? This is controlled through the "Administration>Input Formats". If you want every authenticated user to be able to add full pages to the glossary, then you would enable the glossary with each of the input formats available to those users. However, if you only want specific users to have that abililty, Use or create an input format that only those users, or type of users, will be using.
.............>>> More to be added here later <<< .................

Cf., note that the page has fairly detailed instructions for the glossary module that might be at least partially recycled in revised documentation.

I had time to play a bit more and am slowly beginning to comprehend the functionality here. You can attain multiple "detailed descriptions," i.e., attach multiple nodes to a term, by tagging multiple nodes with the term. However, when you do so, in content nodes the term and its definition are no longer linked from an occurrence of the term in the text. Instead, when you click on a term link in the text, you get a page composed of the titles and teasers from all nodes tagged with the term. In other words, you get Drupal taxonomy behavior. One criticism here is that "attach" is probably not the right term to use for this functionality. A better term would be "associate" or more simply, just "link."

Another way of viewing the functionality is to observe that you must not use a glossary vocabulary as a taxonomy tag on a node unless you desire that: [i] the term/definition no longer be linked from its occurrences in content nodes; and [ii] content nodes be identified and linked as "detailed description" from a term/definition pair. Treating glossary entries as normal taxonomy tags carries a price. If you do not desire those results, then crate a new, non-Glossary vocabulary using the same terms/tag names or as many of them as you desire.

The "associated nodes" Glossary feature assumes that only nodes which are in fact "detailed descriptions" of defined terms will be tagged with the term.

I will work this information into the draft documentation.

Conceivable enhancements

Playing with the feature brings to mind the following conceivable enhancements for Glossary:

• Add Glossary terms to another vocabulary. Assuming that a user wishes to use the detailed description feature for its intended purpose but also wishes to use the Glossary terms as or as part of a separate taxonomy for tagging node purposes, an ability to automagically have new Glossary terms added to a second vocabulary would be a big plus. This would basically be a one-way synchronization, in case a user wanted additional terms in the second vocabulary. Rationale: It's a PITA to keep large dual vocabularies synchronized manually.

  This might be better done as a separate more general purpose module or as an add-on to the Taxonomy module, using an "add vocabulary A to vocabulary B synchronization tool" approach, with "synchronize 2-way" and "synchronize automagically upon new entry options."

• Display term and definition with associated nodes.

  This might be a sub-option for the detailed descriptions feature. This would work like the present functionality, except that when a site visitor clicks on a vocabulary term in a content node, the resulting page displays the term/description, followed by the display of associated node titles and teasers. In this scenario, the link name on the glossary term/definition would change from "detailed description" to something like "term also discussed in *these nodes,*" where *these nodes* is the link to display the content described in this list item.

  Rationale: This change would enable Glossary entries to be used both as a tagging taxonomy and as a glossary without maintaining a duplicate vocabulary for tagging purposes. Note, however, that should this concept be developed, pagination of output would be necessary on many sites because of the number of nodes that are tagged with a single term. Of the two approaches suggested in this post, I would personally choose this one.