Hi everyone!
I’ve read through many of the biggest threads I could find on the forums over the last couple of days, but if I came across answers to these questions then I didn’t take them in… I started using Obsidian a couple of months ago, and have realized that my decision to allow order/MOCs to “emerge organically”, without having an eye to when was the right moment to go ahead and actually make an MOC, had lead me to using Obsidian like a slightly better Evernote. I was using tags for all linking, and so lacked any kind of heirarchy. I had a “dispersed organization” as another thread here called it, I think, rather than what I want/need, which is a “decentralized” one.
I have four questions right now:
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How do you approach the relationship of siblings in a nested chain of MOCs? It’s clear to me that parents and children of any given MOC should appear in that MOC, but what about siblings? E.g. if I have [[MOC Epistemology]] and it has many children, e.g. [[MOC Logical Positivism]] [[MOC Perspectivalism]] [[MOC Relativism]] etc., would you include links to all the siblings in each of those, along with its parent and children? It makes sense conceptually to have links between perspectivalism and relativism, for example, but positivism doesn’t really share much more with those two than being another brand of epistemology… I will be facing this issue again and again, so if anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them.
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How do you deal with backlinks/links to MOCs? Do you make the linkage fully “explicit” by making sure that there is both a normal link and a backlink between each note and each relevant MOC? Are there any upsides to not doing this, except saving some work? Like is it somehow going to make my graph unusable or something?
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Is it possible (is there a plugin which allows you) to copy links to all the notes that a current note backlinks to? This would be extremely useful to me as I complete the process of making MOCs out of tags, several of which have 20+ backlinks already… I had a look through the community plugins page but was surprised to find this doesn’t seem to exist? Unless I’m missing something…
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Lastly, if you are working on a big/long project, where your thinking will inevitably change concerning the biggest themes and issues (the biggest/most important MOCs), do you bother to write much on the MOC page? I can see the virtues of trying to distill what you would otherwise have spread across a potentially unmanageable number of notes there, but at the same time it seems that anything I write now will be only useful for a short period of time. So the choices are: (a) completely bare-bones collections of links arranged in an order that makes sense, with subcategories if necessary, (b) fully fleshed out mini-essays containing my current thinking/research on the subject of the MOC, © some compromise between the two. Where do you usually tend to fall?
Apologies this is so long! Hopefully it can start an interesting conversation 