Help needed to create and organize a big vault

Help
1

Hey everyone

I am fairly new to obsidian, I am trying to create a vault that’ll store information on a variety of topics about the world such as History of various countries, Philosophy, Summaries of various related books etc.

Since the vault is going to be vast in future, I’d like to use best practices to make sure everything stays organized. (any tips on how to do so are appreciated)

Question 1) I want to store new words (to expand my vocabulary) alongside their meanings and some example sentences. what’s the best way to store them? In a numbered list in a separate note? , a table ? or is there something much better like bases or anything? cuz this table of words will gradually grow into hundreds or words

Question 2) Can any experienced users that have big vaults have any good generic tips about folder/file management? or Maybe about some new plugins or anything, because I’m really new to obsidian and only know the basics, any tips or detailed guides would be appreciated

2

In general, I can suggest that you try each method on small but known data and decide after 3-4 weeks whether this method is suitable for you.
Answers:

  1. The vocabulary seems to perfectly match the dataview plugin and atomic notes, one for each word. Perhaps all the word notes should be in a shared folder.
  2. All other improvements, such as plugins, settings, hotkeys, etc., are things that get worse the better. Fewer settings and plug—ins - easier future work. Any new plugins and settings should solve the problem that you are seeing now and that you cannot solve with the installed plugins. Otherwise, your obsidian will become slower and heavier, even if it is justified by the amount of data.

p.s. Graph is obsidian killer-feature, perhaps you’d like to start research from graph and cross-notes (internal) links. All of other in my mind is not as usefull as graph.

p.p.s. Dataview is useful in many vocabular-like cases but absolutely disconnected with graph and has pure :: syntax. This is little facts that can be helpfull in future. Personally I still use :: syntax.

3
  1. Check out the Knowledge management section of the Obsidian-Forum. There is lots of content for that.
  2. Look at the zettelkasten-method. It’s about connecting Ideas in a network for later retrieval, for example writing.
  3. Steph Ango has some ideas on how to setup a vault. It’s worth a read.

In short: Put pieces of information into one markdown-file and connect them with links to other files that are relevant. Maybe use some tags to be able to connect information that are not connected by links, but by comparable topics. Setup two folders. One where “to be processed” files land in, and one archive where every “finished” information exists in.