Inspirational thoughts about using tags

[bimlas]

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)  is the practice of capturing the ideas and insights we encounter in our daily life, whether from personal experience, from books and articles, or from our work, and cultivating them over time to produce more creative, higher quality work. I teach people how to master PKM in my online course Building a Second Brain.
By collecting our knowledge in a centralized place outside of our own heads, we can create an engine of creative output – a “second brain” – to advance a career, build a business, or pursue a passion. By making this knowledge digital, we can reap the benefits of searchability, backups, syncing between devices, sharing with others, and more.
But there’s one aspect of personal knowledge management I haven’t fully addressed, which is tags. In the past, I criticized tags harshly as being too taxing, overly complicated, and low value for the effort required. I advised people not to use tags to manage their knowledge, favoring notebooks or folders instead.
But I’ve changed my mind since then. Over several years of observations, findings, and experiments, I’ve come to believe that tags could be the missing link in making our knowledge collections truly adaptable – able to reorient and reconfigure themselves on the fly to enable any goal we wish to pursue.
Let me tell you what I believe is required to unlock the immense potential of tagging for personal knowledge management.

https://praxis.fortelabs.co/a-complete-guide-to-tagging-for-personal-knowledge-management/

[PMario]

Hi,

Thx for sharing the link. ... Is this a find, or your text?

-m

[bimlas]

Just found, not my writing. My Google Translate English knowledge is not enough for such a long text. :D

[TonyM]

Villas

Its very good and I am still to finish reading it. I have made similar observations myself, have learned some good new ideas.

Yet I also belive it over values tags in some ways by ignoring other structures such as the use of categories, keywords and subjects which can be implemented with tags but unnessasarily overuse tags, some would say polute the tag space. I would be happy to explain further.

Another area it falls short in in a deeper understanding of the new maths and science of networks including the many possible types of networks, some of which resemble hierarchies. And example of different networks can be found in database design and models.

I can only raise these objections because to a great degree it already puts some good arguments and raises some important points. To me, experienced in this area as I am, it is easier for me to criticize. But it is a good piece of writing (so far).

Tony

[Mohammad]

Thanks Bilmas, I think part of it can be borrowed to explain why tag is useful in Tiddlywiki.com!
Many of us do not use tags effectively in PKM.

And to Jeremy: based on this text we can say Tiddlywiki is a PKM tool! one of the best may be.

--Mohammad

[HansWobbe]

I found this quite useful.

Since I started working with Tags in the early days of Flickr, my usage has matured dramatically.  So far, I have not found any open-source system as powerful for tagging as TiddlyWiki.  Based on my experience to date, I would try to render the article's ... "building a second brain knowledge life cycle"

as an upwardly growing cone or spiral since I feel that depicts observation that "the more you know, the more you can learn".  That could also depict the idea that disseminating the information can take place an many different vertical levels.

Thanks for posting it.

Regards,

Hans

[TonyM]

Hans

Useful metaphor "upwardly growing cone or spiral"

Tony

[bimlas]

When I started using TiddlyWiki, I originally thought the tags were the perfect solution to find notes easily: just pick the right tags and find what I was looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a description of running TiddlyWiki on Node, I select the "TiddlyWiki", "Node", and "Hosting" tags. Or, for example, if I'm looking for cat's description, I select the "pet", "mammal", "cute" tags. The system works because our brain also connects concepts through their similar qualities (I think), but the problem is the same as in our brain: we get a disordered concept set.

No matter how much I wanted to avoid, a hierarchy (ToC) is needed because it makes the system organized. The great thing about working with TiddlyWiki is that the same note can appear in several different parts of the hierarchy. For example, a cat may be included in the "pets" and "mammals" branches. 

But besides the hierarchy (as can be seen from the description), it is also necessary to have the tags visible. If someone wants to see the structure (ToC) and the tags at the same time, he might be interesting to have the Locator plugin: https://bimlas.gitlab.io/tw5-locator/

Trying to apply the theories in this article, here is an example usage of Locator sidebar: https://bimlas.gitlab.io/

[TonyM]

Bimlas,

On my large personal tiddlywiki my main organisational method is defining tiddler-types such as object, project, task, reference, document, domain (work / personal) person and client. In this way my search always starts with knowledge of both the tiddler type and its context which is "domain, Project, client" and I can always look at it from the perspective of a person. None of these use tags, just fields. So tags are free for for what they are best at, but I use surprisingly few.

Regards

Tony