Too many links/keyword bloat

Knowledge management
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Hi folks. Is anyone feeling overwhelmed by the number of links they are creating? I am starting to feel that way. I link to very broad keywords, like [[agriculture]] or [[Canada]] but am feeling a bit overwhelmed by this. I was wondering if anyone else feels this way and what you are doing about it, or if anyone has some advice for how to create more intentional links.

Thanks!

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As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. You could reduce the number of notes or add structure to the ones you already have. Here are some things to think about…

  • Are those broad pages valuable to you? Those pages can easily be substituted with nested tags, which would also help you reduce the number of links.
  • Do you use those pages to group other notes? You could try making an ever higher-level page/folder to group those pages.
  • Are they filled with generic information you can easily Google or already know? To which I would ask, is it really worth keeping if it’s distracting you?

Think about why you’re linking them to these broader pages in the first place. You can find an alternative way to reduce or manage noise. The answer may be one you already mentioned: create more intentional links. What is your intent with those links?

Remember to take a step back and look at the mess. When you do, you will naturally find ways to organize and structure the chaos. It’s just reminding yourself to do so in the first place.

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I follow this simple rule.

I make a link between two notes only if I find a “why” for that link.

I think that over-linking has no value, useless links are noise.

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Thanks @andy76 and @TeddySou for your replies. I appreciate the insight.

I’ve gone through and removed a lot of my links and empty pages, which has been cathartic. One thing I’m doing instead is to add tags for my future self, like #useful, #phd-proposal

This gives me greater confidence I’ll find uses for the notes I’m making.

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I have a lot of note stored in folders like “People”, “Places”, etc, so that I can put the people I met and the places I met in these folders, as separated informative note, of course.

The informative note contains a piece of information which will help to create, to generate the other notes. At least, the autocompletion can save me some time when I mention the information in the other notes. No need to say I can also figure out the interactions with people. It is possible that some of the people, I will not meet for a period of long time, maybe years, but it is still ok for me to keep the informative notes representing them in my note system, in case I need to process the news I heard or read about them.

In order to not annoyed by those informative note too much in the daily use, I use search, query a lot. I think the search and query capability is the best thing that Obsidian provided. When I review my notes, I will intentionally exclude some folders, so the notes within those folders and their subfolders will not distract my attention.

With this capability, one can also create and work with a bigger slip-box, but at the same time, use this slip-box as multiple smaller but more dedicated slip-boxes. This will be more effective for the daily usage.

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Thanks for this thoughtful response! I guess having “keyword notes” is not a big deal as long as I can use searches effectively. This was helpful, thank you for sharing!

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In case you are interested in the search , just FYI,

  1. The workspace feature can be used to create a entry point for the work flow, and in obsidian, the search term can be fixed by the workspace feature, as well. So with it, one can combine the workflow and specific initial search term accordingly.
  2. Some plugins may bring more flexibilities and probabilities. For example, copy search url plugin can make the reuse of the historical search terms more feasible. The obsidian-query-control plugin, which is my favorite, can render the search and query results as in the “read mode”. If one is used to the preview mode, this plug-in is the enabler for making easy-to-read index note
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I use a combination of tags and links…

  1. Tags for board types of notes, subjects, sources, etc.
  2. Links to tie the Tags together to help bubble information to the surface.

Example:
Note 1 Tags = Litnote; robotics; article
Note 2 Tags = Litnote; AI; Book

Link note 1 & 2 [[author]] or [[reference]] or [[commonality]]

So while searching or graphing for a robotics note the AI notes will also surface.

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