[HN Gopher] Categories for Your Note Archive Are a Bad Idea (2015)
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Categories for Your Note Archive Are a Bad Idea (2015)
Author : Tomte
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-07-25 12:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zettelkasten.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (zettelkasten.de)
| hwayne wrote:
| This is an argument against taxonomic classification, not
| categories per se. In Wikipedia, pages can belong to multiple
| categories, and categories can have multiple parent categories.
| It's more complex than single hierarchical taxonomies, but it's
| also a lot more expressive.
|
| That expressiveness is something I find is missing from a lot of
| tag systems. Most have no structure at all, when even a little
| structure makes things a lot more convenient. At the very least,
| I want hierarchical tags. Let things I tag "physics" show up in a
| search for "science!"
|
| (I think most systems don't have structured tags because it
| raises a lot of implementation and UI questions. How do you
| prevent cycles? Do searches go one layer deep or are they fully
| transitive?)
|
| See also the first comment in TFA:
|
| > I maintained the largest collection of dishes served by
| restaurants for more than 10 years. [...] 70% of the metadata was
| captured via tags, manually added or automatically extracted from
| plain text. Our clients notified us that some of the entries were
| of poor quality: for instance some dishes were tagged with
| "vegan" and "beef" at the same time.
| samatman wrote:
| #vegan and #beef is an interesting example which I didn't get.
|
| Either a dish is vegan, or it has beef. So a dish tagged #vegan
| and #beef is either wrong about the #vegan tag, or has... vegan
| beef, which ontology aside, exists in the sense that there are
| foods with this name.
|
| Hierarchies can't fix misclassification, a beef-containing dish
| doesn't belong in the #Vegan: namespace either.
|
| As for organizing tags, something I'd like to see (pending a
| reasonable UX) is just being able to tag tags. #physics could
| be tagged #science, and #science could be tagged #physics,
| cycles aren't a problem for set union.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| A dish tagged #vegan and #beef would imply vegan meat version
| zmgsabst wrote:
| A dish with an option could legitimately be both -- as, eg,
| burritos at my local Mexican place allow a variety of meat
| and non-meat fillings. For a single item on the menu.
|
| If they didn't separate, eg, burrito options into different
| entries, then you'd get a burrito entry with both "vegan" and
| "beef" _correctly_.
| camoufleur wrote:
| The music site RateYourMusic has a hierarchical genre tree.
| They might organize it like this:
|
| - beef [meta]
|
| - - beef (co-parent: meat)
|
| - - vegan beef (co-parent: vegetarian faux meat)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Categories are an excellent idea if the system is small enough
| and everybody using it is familiar with the convention. It's just
| that you have to accept they are flawed, unaccurate, partial and
| biased.
|
| That doesn't mean they are not useful.
|
| Think about supermarket scales: each vegetable or fruit is in a
| single category. The category is flawed, but nobody wants to have
| to type a precise list of tags to filter what they need. You want
| to go to vegetable and chose tomatoes, not to have a inner debate
| about the tomatoes taxonomy. Isn't a fruit? Wait, is fruit a
| biology thing or a commercial concept? I don't care, give me my
| damn tomatoes!
|
| It's the same for my notes. Some stuff are in weird directories.
| But I know how I sort them out, so I can find them quickly. I
| don't want to have to be precise or accurate, only find what I
| need.
|
| Category don't replace tags, buts tags are mainly useful for
| advanced searches and filtering. Anyway, the best systems out
| there consider a category as a tag, just the main tag.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Is anyone aware of classifiers that work well on {content text}
| + {tag collection} + {search history} and generate categories?
| Specifically something that would be usable on personal notes.
|
| Categories seem incredibly useful at exploration-time, but
| impossible to write at creation-time.
|
| Tags seem incredibly easy to write at creation-time, but aren't
| useful at exploration-time.
|
| Why not both, with a fuzzy link between them?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| My go to is to consider that the first tag is the category,
| or the directory it's in. Depending on the system, you may
| reverse it: the category is the main tag.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I don't have any kind of system for notes, but I've found the
| "tagmash" feature on LibraryThing to be useful:
| https://blog.librarything.com/2007/07/tagmash/
| aaronchall wrote:
| Categories are mutually exclusive.
|
| Tags aren't. I much prefer searching in intersections of tags to
| searching for needles that may be in different haystacks.
| Tomte wrote:
| No, they aren't. Storage position is mutually exclusive, if you
| choose so, but that's not a property of categories vs. tags.
|
| E.g. the Library of Congress assigns books to several subject
| headings (categories) where applicable.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Depends on what meaning you put on each word. There is no One
| True Meaning in this case.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm just waiting for the tongue-in-cheek article from someone
| that says "Why you should use the Dewey Decimal Classification to
| organize your notes". And then the refutation based on the
| limitations of DDC and the inevitable follow on article that says
| "Why you should sort your notes by Library of Congress
| Classification instead of Dewey Decimal".
| cratermoon wrote:
| I can already give the refutation for LoC.
|
| Library of Congress Classification Outline: Class D - World
| History and History of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New
| Zealand, Etc.
| https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/classification/lcco/lcco_...
| bityard wrote:
| I'm putting the finishing touches on my own[1] wiki/personal
| knowledge base and eventually decided against any categorization
| whatsoever.
|
| The main reason being that I don't want to be caught up wasting
| time _curating_ my notes. Which all other note-keeping software
| seems to encourage or require. My notes are a tool that I depend
| on simply to function adequately and are neither hobby nor art. I
| don't want to answer the same questions over and over like:
|
| * Which category does this page fit into?
|
| * If there are two categories, which is more important?
|
| * Which set of tags most accurately describes the content of this
| page?
|
| * And will those change when I edit it later?
|
| I find all of my content in three ways:
|
| 1. Most articles have one obvious title, e.g. "Python" or
| "Proxmox". I have a shortcut set up in my browser so that when I
| go to the URL bar, I type "w python" and it will take me to the
| page in my notes about Python.
|
| 2. The wiki has a very good search engine, which can search page
| titles and page bodies. Similar to the above, I type "ws python"
| to get search results of all pages that mention "python"
| somewhere in them.
|
| 3. Very occasionally, I will click on a link on one page to go to
| another page.
|
| And what would be the point of categorizing all my notes? Every
| single time I go to my wiki, it's to either write down something
| specific or search for something specific. I have _never_ wanted
| to see a list of all of my pages about programming languages for
| example. Or every page tagged "bash".
|
| I think as software engineers building our own tools, we
| sometimes build features because they sound interesting and we
| know how to do it, or because the project doesn't "feel" complete
| without them. Not because we'll ever actually use them.
|
| When I _do_ want to break up a large subject (e.g. Python) into
| multiple pages, I just create one "Python" page and link to all
| of the others from that page.
|
| The one concession I've made to categorization/organization is
| that I've added a feature where two pages can be marked as
| "related" to one another. This is mainly to avoid having a
| manually-edited "See Also" section on pages that touch upon
| topics covered on other pages.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/cu/silicon
| cratermoon wrote:
| Have you considered tagging your notes according to how you
| intend or potentially expect to use it? Instead of spending
| time thinking about where the note came from or what it's
| about, mark it with whatever topic or publication you are
| working on when you make the note. When you come back to use
| your KB to write or build something, you can start with the set
| of notes you previously collected for that purpose.
|
| If you're skeptical, try it a little bit, It's kind of amazing
| how it can jumpstart work. In fact, you can backfill notes you
| already have using this concept. Whenever you are working on
| some output, when you look to your KB for guidance, mark any
| notes you use with according to why you found it useful.
|
| For example, it's probably that not all the notes about
| "Python" will be relevant when working on Jupyter Notebooks.
| But you might also want any relevant notes about data analysis
| in Jupyter. Tag the notes you use in the output, and next time
| you revisit the subject, there will already be a set of useful
| starting points.
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