To help me look after my vault, I have a small number of “detectonotes”, that have a bunch of alias phrases defined. I use them to sweep up notes in my vault ,that have key phrases in them that I want to avoid appearing in my writing/thinking/note-taking. For example, these are the aliases for the “Alarmbell phrases” note:
---
aliases:
- is it possible
- is this possible
- its always true
- "it's always true"
- can we just
- nobody does
- noone does
- everybody does
- everyone does
- we already know
- make it visible
- just need to
- just simplify
- if only
- answer is obvious
- its obvious
- "it's obvious"
- its trivial
- "it's trivial"
- unassailable
- stands to reason
- experience insists
- unquestionable
- unquestionably
- indisputable
- indisputably
- must-have
- unbeatable
---
With this created, any other note in the vault that contains those words or phrases now has an unlinked mention to this note; every so often I come to a “detectonote” and go through the unlinked mentions, reviewing and editing the text. By going to one of these notes and looking at the unlinked mentions, I can find the notes in the vault that have used those phrases and then re-work them as required.
I’ve attached all the “detectonote” notes I have at the moment, if you want to give this a go then drop them in your vault and have a look at the unlinked mentions - it should just work (make sure you have the Backlinks core plugin enabled).
Corporate speak.md (421 Bytes)
Alarmbell phrases.md (724 Bytes)
Outrageously Exaggerated.md (303 Bytes)
Tautologies.md (471 Bytes)
Consider and commit.md (304 Bytes)
Note that they’re tailored to my current and desired writing style and topics - YMMV with them. Specifically, you may find you need to remove some terms/phrases because you’re getting too many false positive links in your content.
Happy vault tidying, and I’d love to hear any ideas or extensions on this idea!
(also, thanks to @jpfieber for encouraging me to write this up via this thread Obsidian Upkeep Note)