This is why I prefer to link the MOC(s) in the actual notes, rather than commit to updating every MOC itself. Only one file to edit - the note I’m working on. When I open the MOC I look at backlinks, instead of a list of links.
This is an interesting idea. Of course the backlink list could be very long, and not being fully conversant yet in the GUI, I’m not sure how that affects usability. On the surface it seems like it would work fine. Off the top of my head, the only possible problem I can see is if you want to answer the question, “Which notes are associated with this MOC,” The answer is in the backlink list, not in a note. Having a list in a note is handy if you decide you want to do something with the list outside of Obsidian. By having the links in the MOC, gathering the notes external to Obsidian is easy; it’s the list of links in the MOC note. I don’t know how easy it would be to get that same list out of the backlinks list in the GUI. One could search for the actual link definition, and the search list would be that same list of notes, but it seems to be the same problem, just in a different GUI list.
One other thing I’m experimenting with is including date links like [[2020-12-03]]. This means I can go to a daily note and see in its backlinks any notes either composed on that day or referring to an event that occurred on that date (I haven’t yet settled on a convention).
This is yet another interesting idea. I was thinking that if I always want to have the option to see any set of my notes as a chronology, I would have to format the note title as:
YYYYMMDDhhmm.Title
so that searches would always return notes in chronological order. (Although right now I don’t know if there’s a way to get Obsidian to insert the timestamp in the title.) I really need the timestamp down to the minute if I want to absolutely guarantee that notes are in chronological order. Sometimes I’ll have some important phone calls throughout the day, and their order represents a chronology of back-and-forth communication.
With my thus-far limited knowledge of Obsidian, I’m not sure if reversing the link direction saves anything. You either define a link to the note in the MOC, or a link to the MOC in the note. The one situation where there is a savings is if your note structure requires that some notes are in more than one MOC. Then there’s a savings because you can just define the multiple links-to-MOCs in the note quickly, versus having to visit each MOC separately and enter the link for the note. The efficacy of this method will come down to how easy it is to work with the association as presented in the backlinks list.
But if you’re only associating a note to a single MOC, I don’t see a savings: you define the new note link in the MOC, get out of edit mode, then click the link to create the note.
This is a helpful conversation and you’ve given me some things to think about, so thanks for that!