The article is all over the place, but I think I might be able to summarize:
- ZK involves organizing your cards in a tree
- This tree is not a taxonomy. It merely reflects the way in which the information was consumed or the ideas were created.
- It is better to link cards together with ID numbers rather than by giving cards names and using wikilinks. Wikilinks imply some amount of taxonomic organization of the cards. (Remember, naming things is one of the two difficult things in CS, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.)
- There shouldn't be a master table of contents that one organizes. This gives an implied taxonomic organization of the cards.
One idea from Memexes and early hypertext systems are "trails", which are special entries that include links to other cards. They're sort of special-purpose tables of contents into the hypertext archive. These are important for navigation, and they don't require that the entire archive be taxonomically organized.
Indexing is a good idea. It's basically a curated full text search.
> The index. That much overlooked invention.
I don't know if I'm just misremembering Cat's Cradle as a work of non-fiction, but I think I heard that Vonnegut sat next to an indexer on an airplane once, and they convinced him of the value of indexing. I thought I remember there being an index at the end of Cat's Cradle, but I can't find my copy to check.
- ZK involves organizing your cards in a tree
- This tree is not a taxonomy. It merely reflects the way in which the information was consumed or the ideas were created.
- It is better to link cards together with ID numbers rather than by giving cards names and using wikilinks. Wikilinks imply some amount of taxonomic organization of the cards. (Remember, naming things is one of the two difficult things in CS, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.)
- There shouldn't be a master table of contents that one organizes. This gives an implied taxonomic organization of the cards.
One idea from Memexes and early hypertext systems are "trails", which are special entries that include links to other cards. They're sort of special-purpose tables of contents into the hypertext archive. These are important for navigation, and they don't require that the entire archive be taxonomically organized.
Indexing is a good idea. It's basically a curated full text search.
> The index. That much overlooked invention.
I don't know if I'm just misremembering Cat's Cradle as a work of non-fiction, but I think I heard that Vonnegut sat next to an indexer on an airplane once, and they convinced him of the value of indexing. I thought I remember there being an index at the end of Cat's Cradle, but I can't find my copy to check.