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MNBlockHead
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2014
Location: Twin Cities Area, MN, USA
Posts: 1,325

Old February 5th, 2015, 12:51 PM
Good points. Though, why need containers as separate from relationships? Any container is also a relationship. That said, back in the early 2000s I tried to get away from folders in my e-mail and only use tags. When Gmail came along it made it even easier to take this approach with "labels". A lot of document management software started to offer things like "smart folders" which just combined the concept of a folder, a tag, and a saved search into one concept. Google Apps with Google Docs--same thing. Then Evernote. But after years of trying to live with just "tags" and search, I find that I still use directory folders. Tags can get messy quickly. They are great when you have large numbers of people tagging the same documents to build folksonomies that allow for algorithms to predict relationships and interests but because a traditional folder means a copy of the document has to be there, it causes you to really think about how you organize your information.

With Gmail, for example, I now rarely use labels. I it just ended up being more busy work. I rely on search and auto-classification. For Evernote, I still use tags but I still rely on folders for the "big buckets."

I'm still trying to determine the best approach in Realmworks. For me, a lot of it comes down to how important it is for me to find an article within the directory structure. So, for example, I have equipment organized by containers. e.g. armor/heavy armor/plate mail

With my bestiary, however, I keep it flat as I find it easier to scroll through an alphabetical list than drill down throw containers and having to remember how a particular monster may have been categorized. For monsters, tags make more sense for those times when I want to find all monsters of a certain type—but most of the time, I know the monster I want by name and can easily get to it in an alphabetical list.

So, my organization is not as logically consistent as Chemlak's and based more on how I generally try to get to a given type of article. I hope it doesn't come to bite me in the future, but for now it works well.
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