Tags vs page/link

I loved when you said:

Storing information or even knowledge is the easy part. Retrieving it is a fine art.

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Iā€™ve read this thread twice already, top to bottom, and I still canā€™t figure out this dilemma for myself.

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I use tags as status/type indicators and everything else gets a link. I find it easier to build out a bigger note when I have it as a link/page once it gets enough other things linking to it that I want to develop the idea.

I call them Tagnotes and I talked about and demonstrated how I do it here: Obsidian Tagnotes - YouTube

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I feel this

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In some in-deep Zettlekasten studies, someone talks about ā€œweakā€ and ā€œstrongā€ linking.
For example, if I write a zettle about the ā€œShow donā€™t tellā€ method, I could link this article to the ā€œSave the catā€ method as their both anglosaxon method to construct a writing piece. It is a strong link, as I contextualise them into the article and they are directly related. I can also link the article to a extract from a book as a good example of ā€œShow donā€™t tellā€ or my own analysis of a film. This process mimics the way your brain functions, creating associations between ideas to create new ideas.

But tags are different, as you can find yourself linking things together without context and evident relationship. For example, I can set a tag ā€œMedical adviseā€ with an article about healing a stomach pain and an other one about when consulting a physician for a headache is a good idea. They are not directly related even if they take place in the same field. But methods, causes and consequences are not the same at all.

When you study something, the ideal configuration is the one that requires you the less efforts as you need to concentrate a lot to gather and incorporate new knowledges. Direct linkings allow you to constantly call back what you learnd before. Tags allows you to create categories. Do you need categories ? To do what ?

Myself I donā€™t use them at all. I use to, because this feature is rather a convention, but I donā€™t need them anymore. For example I set up the tag ā€œmedicine adviseā€ in the title with my file naming process : medecine notes begins with a number ā€œ013ā€ and advise becomes ā€œ013.02.Headache.When call the doctor.Adviceā€. When I type ā€œ013.Adviseā€ in my quick switcher, the research tools find for me every files from medecine with ā€œadviseā€ in their title. The page "ā€œ013.02.Headache.When call the doctor.Adviceā€ is linked to the ā€œ013.02.Headache.Possible causesā€.

I hope you find this usefull :slight_smile:

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During organizing existing documents without a good structure yet for MOCs, I find it useful to begin with tagging, then migrate to pages. I just released Tag Wrangler 0.5.0 with the ability to create Tag Pages so that one can convert a tag to a hybrid tag/page, and migrate tags to links via the ā€œunlinked mentionsā€.

At some point, I may add a function for automated conversion in one direction or both to the plugin, but at least at the moment it gives you some maneuvering room between the two, without needing to decide once and for all that youā€™re using tags or links: tag pages let both co-exist at the same time for a given topic or state. And theyā€™re especially useful for dataviews on state tags, as you can hover-preview them from the tag pane.

In a way, tag pages give you a privileged set of pages that can be readily accessed from a sidebar pane, which can make it easier to do hierarchical organization similar to Dendron ā€“ i.e. you can make a hierarchy of concepts in tags and link them to pages, even without the pages themselves needing to be named that way or in a folder hierarchy.

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Iā€™m using tags and links for different purposes:

Links - to show connections between ideas
Tags - to build clusters of ideas with similar attributes. Used for filtering & searching of ideas

Does it make sense?

@Edmund - Nice diagram.

The only cornerstone I didnā€™t fully grasp was the ā€œFolders - to group PROCESSES for creating different types of notesā€.

How is a process filed into a folder?

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@JeffJAG Using Obsidian as a Zettelkasten, there is a workflow (process) from ā€žSourceā€œ (reading) to ā€žTargetā€œ (writing). For different steps of this workflow, I have different folders.

Here is more about: Limit folders. How to use Zettelkasten in Obsidian - #13 by Edmund

In each folder you can find notes with different structures, different attributes and different purpose. The folder structure supports this process and is very useful to inspect and adapt existing notes.

Lightbulb: instead of folders (except for reasons adjacent to processing), tags. Giving something two tags is pretty similar in a tag pane to nesting something 2 deep in a folder pane, and you get the option of having a thing in multiple tag groups, when you canā€™t have a thing in multiple folders.

The one loss, is I liked being able to create a new note and have it automatically in the same category (folder) as the previous note (because usually I create new notes of the same broad subject as the old). Is there a way I can do that with tags?