Zettelkasten/Patterns/Page Organization

Main: Zettelkasten

Up: Zettelkasten/Patterns

Overview

The way that pages are organized on a wiki is central to the way the entire wiki is structured. While it may seem like a trivial topic that anyone can figure out as they go, a zettelkasten is intended to hold notes accumulated over many years, and as pages accumulate more information they can start to become inconsistent, crowded, and messy.

We use two patterns when creating new pages, and these help the page to stay organized and useful for multiple uses, and can collect and organize notes over many years.

Summary of the Patterns

The two patterns we use to organize pages are:

1. Reserving top-level headers for meta-level page organization. This helps the page be useful for many purposes, and tends to reduce the depth of page hierarchies in a natural way.
2. Moving information to sub-pages when it starts accumulating or requiring multiple levels of subheaders

An Example of the Problem

Let's start by looking at an example of the problem we're trying to solve.

Suppose you have your MediaWiki zettelkasten, and you start a single note that is on a broad topic. The note might start with a simple structure, have its own internal logic, and be organized consistently. Easy as that!

But now suppose you come back to that same topic three months later, with a different perspective and a different purpose. Maybe you're starting a new project, and re-using some information from the note but also adding new information. Or maybe you learned some new information that changes the way the page should be organized.

With a page in place, with its own structure and organization and logic, it can be difficult to know where to incorporate new information down the road. The ideal note-taking system eliminates that kind of internal friction, and makes it as easy as possible to capture new information, without the cognitive burden of having to reorganize the page again and again.