Why Categories for Your Note Archive Are a Bad Idea (2015)

• silicon

  9 184 6.8 Python

  Silicon Notes, a web-based personal knowledge base with few frills (by cu)

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

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