I'm putting the finishing touches on my own[1] wiki/personal knowledge base and eventually decided against any categorization whatsoever.
The main reason being that I don't want to be caught up wasting time _curating_ my notes. Which all other note-keeping software seems to encourage or require. My notes are a tool that I depend on simply to function adequately and are neither hobby nor art. I don't want to answer the same questions over and over like:
* Which category does this page fit into?
* If there are two categories, which is more important?
* Which set of tags most accurately describes the content of this page?
* And will those change when I edit it later?
I find all of my content in three ways:
1. Most articles have one obvious title, e.g. "Python" or "Proxmox". I have a shortcut set up in my browser so that when I go to the URL bar, I type "w python" and it will take me to the page in my notes about Python.
2. The wiki has a very good search engine, which can search page titles and page bodies. Similar to the above, I type "ws python" to get search results of all pages that mention "python" somewhere in them.
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.
Have you considered tagging your notes according to how you intend or potentially expect to use it? Instead of spending time thinking about where the note came from or what it's about, mark it with whatever topic or publication you are working on when you make the note. When you come back to use your KB to write or build something, you can start with the set of notes you previously collected for that purpose.
If you're skeptical, try it a little bit, It's kind of amazing how it can jumpstart work. In fact, you can backfill notes you already have using this concept. Whenever you are working on some output, when you look to your KB for guidance, mark any notes you use with according to why you found it useful.
For example, it's probably that not all the notes about "Python" will be relevant when working on Jupyter Notebooks. But you might also want any relevant notes about data analysis in Jupyter. Tag the notes you use in the output, and next time you revisit the subject, there will already be a set of useful starting points.
The main reason being that I don't want to be caught up wasting time _curating_ my notes. Which all other note-keeping software seems to encourage or require. My notes are a tool that I depend on simply to function adequately and are neither hobby nor art. I don't want to answer the same questions over and over like:
* Which category does this page fit into?
* If there are two categories, which is more important?
* Which set of tags most accurately describes the content of this page?
* And will those change when I edit it later?
I find all of my content in three ways:
1. Most articles have one obvious title, e.g. "Python" or "Proxmox". I have a shortcut set up in my browser so that when I go to the URL bar, I type "w python" and it will take me to the page in my notes about Python.
2. The wiki has a very good search engine, which can search page titles and page bodies. Similar to the above, I type "ws python" to get search results of all pages that mention "python" somewhere in them.
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