Tom Critchlow has an interesting approach to his wiki, where pages are mapped to single folders. It makes for a very clean navigation experience.

My approach to tags is a bit all over the place at the moment. In Decisions that make my life easier I’ve outlined some rules around how tags should be written, but this misses the larger picture around how they should be defined and to what purpose.

Tags as a navigational device

Tags allow you to group content together without having to reference it in the text, like you would with backlinks. This approach allows text to be grouped together by category rather than by direct association of concepts.

A how-i-work tag might contain notes on things like processes, software, musings on Evergreen notes and anything else that relates to the larger topic.

Within this model, tags aren’t full-blown structures unto themselves. They exist only as a system for cataloguing other structures.

Do I even use tags, tho?

As you get started using any system that allows for tags, you tend to over-use them - at least that’s always my experience. Tagging is easy and it feels like you’re building towards something. At what point, though, does that ever materialize into anything? Because tags are so devoid of any structure by themselves, they tend to disappear into the system into which they’re applied. One is better off searching by keywords than by using tags.

Tags as categories

Going back to Tom’s wiki, the approach to tags is more akin to categories or folders, and is taken further by having an index page at certain levels, like so:

As a parent of a little human I’m interested in the lives and workings of both kids and parents. Erin and I both weave through unusual careers, ideas, creativity and travel so collected interesting notions here:

This turns the tag, or category, into a true hub for notes, links, images and anything else.

As with many things in Obsidian, there’s a plugin for that. obsidian-tagfolder shows your tags as folders. It doesn’t turn them into full-blown categories as they exist in Tom’s wiki, but it elevates them from this formless thing and creates a folder-like, tangible, structure out of them.

The Category Trap, or, How Folders increase friction in note-taking

The cool thing about a folderless structure for notes that utilizes wikilinks for connections is that it doesn’t impose a rigid structure on your thoughts. You can simply create a note out of a vague notion of an idea without having to go through the process of categorizing it. This is a bit of a double-edged sword: imposing structure impedes writing and thinking freely, but on the other end of it, it makes for a more chaotic process of retrieval and analysis of past notes.

Tags at all?

Came across a really good critique of tags by Maxwell Forbes. From In Praise And Critique of Digital Gardens - Should I Grow One?:

For tags, I totally get the appeal. I love organizing things, and I love any chance at imposing order over chaos.

1. But as a reader, I not only don’t care that someone put programming, reflection, naval-gazing categories on their blog post, but it even distracts me as I always wonder… why? You are a programmer running a blog where you write about programming, I’m never going to click on your “programming” tag. From years on the web, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve used those tags, and it was always for the novelty of it.
2. As a writer, I think tags—like links—don’t help your thinking or process. I’ve even found the opposite on my own website. Since I came up with tags, it now adds micro friction to my writing if an essay falls in multiple tags, or doesn’t fall into any tag, or if I start suspecting the tags are actually a hierarchy, or maybe even worse don’t fit in a clean hierarchy. Sure you can make a full nested-tag hierarchy and allow pages to have multiple tags. But who, exactly, is benefiting from this obsessive labeling? It might be satisfying, but it’s busywork. Tags don’t exist. Topics don’t exist.