Hi,
pretty new to Obsidian and starting to use it more each day.
Adopted something that was suggested by a few members on this very forum regards how to use Obsidian for meeting notes. I am now taking the notes within my daily notes and then creating standalone pages and linking various things as part of my daily review.
Just wondering how people are using tags vs double square bracket links?
If I have a note on my daily note concerning topic XYZ with Person A and Person B, should I tag using ‘#XYZ’, ‘#PersonA’ and ‘#PersonB’ or use double square bracket links and have separate pages instead?
I am struggling with the way unlinked mentions work - would/should I see an unlinked mention on my daily note pointing to my standalone page on a particular person or only from the standalone page back to my daily note? At the moment it’s the latter.
Suggestions and how others are making use would be useful insights please
Hopefully you understand what I’ve written above 
thanks
1 Like
Tags vs. Pages
After a lot of experimenting, I’ve settled the issue like this:
- Tags are meta-information about the content, they tell me what kind of note it is, or what its status is, or what context it belongs to, not what it’s about.
#article, #recipe, #person, #book, #meeting, etc.
- [[pages]] are for entities, or subjects.
[[Digital Physics]], [[New Orleans Shrimp]], [[Ted Nelson]], [[A Clockwork Orange]], [[January Board Meeting]], etc.
Using your example, topic XYZ would probably deserve its own page [[XYZ]], as well as [[PersonA]] and [[PersonB]]. Inside [[XYZ]] you could collect information about that topic and add wikilinks to related notes; on the other hand, the notes [[PersonA]] and [[PersonB]] could be tagged with #person.
Backlinks
Backlinks tell which pages link to the one you’re viewing. So, if you create a link to [[Meeting with John]] in your daily note 2021-01-09, when you visit that page you’ll see 2021-01-09 in the Backlinks pane.
Hope this helps.
17 Likes
In addition to the answer above:
IMHO, you should use tags #personA #personB IF you don’t plan to add information about only this person somewhere else.
I mean, for example: if you created notes about some trip/situation or something else where some Person was involved AND you don’t want to make separate page about this Person to note interesting facts, hobbies, etc, i.e. information specifically about this Person, than I would use tags.
In other situation, I would use links with backlinks or another way of organizing links like MOC.
TLDR: If you found that you need to add more information specifically about the tag then use links and pages.
Next:
I am struggling with the way unlinked mentions work - would/should I see an unlinked mention on my daily note pointing to my standalone page on a particular person or only from the standalone page back to my daily note? At the moment it’s the latter.
If I get this correctly, no, you wouldn’t. @macedotavares is right, you can see unlinked mentions ONLY to page that you’re viewing.
So if you have 2 daily notes and one of them have [[Person1]] link, and other have only Person1 in text without link, then on page Person1 in backlinks you will see one linked mention from first daily note and one unlinked mention from second.
Also, if you create linked mention to non-existent note, link will have different color, so you will see which note has not been created yet.
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This dilemma was discussed also in Tags vs page/link