On programmatic or user interface title names selection

[TW_Tones]

I want to start a conversation here, which I have raised in the past.

To resolve tiddler naming issues I wish to capture the formal and informal naming methods for tiddlers the community uses. The result will be a useful reference but also feed into a solution I want to build to help users name or rename a tiddler which proposes possible titles based on a range of standards and information that can be gleaned. I would also suggest it incorporate intelligent use of the caption field as well for listing.

I think it fair to place naming into broad categories;

1. When the tiddler is some form of child or subtiddler of another.
   eg "tiddlername - subtiddler"tiddlername/subtiddlername $:/tiddlername/subtiddlername (more please)
2. When the tiddler will be the parent of child or subtiddlers
3. A possibly standalone tiddler but one that exists in a set or hierarchy
4. A possible standalone tiddler but one that exists with particular tags or a context eg domain/project
5. Tiddlers that are one of one or more
6. System tiddlers vs non-system tiddler

Question’s for the community

1. Do you have any other broad categories of naming tiddlers?
2. So what are you informal or formal naming standards?
3. What information may you use or have available to assist you in naming tiddlers?

Please answer here and I will compile it into a wiki page, perhaps I will later move it to “How To?”, please reference the numbered items above where suitable.

Please avoid straying from the subject, “hijacking the thread” but feel free to link to related discussions.

[ahollar]

Sorry for the slow reply, I had to think about it a lot.

I title my notes based on my homebrew note classes. I’m using TiddlyWiki as a platform for most of my personal workflow based on the ideas of zettelkasten, spaced repetition, and several other ideas I arrived at through independent research and combined in a sensible way. It’s a bit akin to the video @Soren_Bjornstad made called “A Tour of My Zettelkasten” he wrote about in the Google group. The core principles of what I’m building (among other things) involve an absence of hierarchy initially. The hierarchy is designed to arise from the notes as they build up around each other. So I end with a few classes of notes: raw information, my thoughts, and indices that arise therefrom (there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m still testing the system so I don’t want to go on too much about something I haven’t thoroughly tested and don’t fully understand.)

The class I made for dealing with bibliography and sources is currently undecided, since I’m still working on implementing @Mohammad 's Refnotes plugin, but will likely be titled as a reference key or citekey by last name, year, and significant memorable word from the title, for example: poe1846amontillado. The class for passages, quotes, or excerpts is currently the passage’s published title in title caps, but I’m still ironing out wrinkles on that. An example would be: The Cask of Amontillado. All other classes (including indices) I make use a simple system for naming that’s based on a sentence fragment with initial caps. I prefer to title my remaining tiddlers with a sentence fragment that reasonably describes the idea in such a way that I could use the sentence fragment in another sentence and it would make some sense, usually a verb and some nouns. I also drop anything that might become repetitive, like “The”, “How to”, “List of”, and “Notes.” Gerunds abound. I remove as many extraneous words as possible and seek to be as precise as possible when describing the note. Examples would be: Masonry for a note about masonry and brickwork, Amontillado vs. sherry for a tiddler comparing Amontillado to Sherry, and Hiding the body (notice I didn’t use the term “How to hide the body” since too many How to’s would be very repetitive.*

*For non US readers, I’m referencing a short story called The Cask of Amontillado, a ubiquitous piece read by most American high school students, by renowned American horror author and poet Edgar Allen Poe.

[Mohammad]

@TW_Tones

When the tiddler is some form of child or subtiddler of another.
eg "tiddlername - subtiddler"tiddlername/subtiddlername $:/tiddlername/subtiddlername (more please)

I use this frequently!
Technically it creates a name space. For example in class I use something like this:

exmaple157/question
exmaple157/data
exmaple157/solution

or

extract-macro-param/styles
extract-macro-param/macros
extract-macro-param/tests

[Mohammad]

@ahollar

The class I made for dealing with bibliography and sources is currently undecided, since I’m still working on implementing @Mohammad 's Refnotes plugin, but will likely be titled as a reference key or citekey by last name, year, and significant memorable word from the title, for example: poe1846amontillado.

It would be great to have your idea and opinion here! Normally I import bibliography data for example from Google Scholar, or Google Books (like Google Books) they normally use authroryear and I use them!

[TW_Tones]

Some brainstorming;

When you create a new tiddler it is either;

• From a particular context eg the current tiddler as in new here
• Perhaps context with other fields eg domain/projectname
• These are some ways to make it unique
  • And a numeric or other increment
  • Make it a subtiddler with a numeric increment where subtiddler is any word or blank eg currentTiddler/task N
    • currentTiddler N (tiddlywiki default)
    • currentTiddler/subtiddler N
    • currentTiddler - subtiddler N
    • $/subtiddler/currentTiddler N
    • $/subtiddler/local-serial-number N
    • $/subtiddler/global-serial-number N

So as I think about this a new name could consist of

• A prefix
  • Maybe current or selected tiddler
  • A word or phrase
  • A previously used prefix
  • A system prefix $:/ or namespace
• A word
  • A word or phrase
  • A previously used “word”
• A suffix
  • could just be an increment
  • A word and or an increment
  • A suffix can describe its relationship
    • eg child
    • A symbol eg “/” or symbols " - "
• An increment

This naming process could be based on an accrued use of the tool with MRU or all previous components. Perhaps seeded with some existing or useful standards. Perhaps the set of three could be named and reused?

We could detect if a tiddler already exists and stop rename or creation.

[ahollar]

As requested by @Mohammad , here are my thoughts so far on using cite keys.

I would like, if it’s not to difficult, to be able to track the sources of what I put in TW. However, it’s getting to be a real pain. Here’s the system I’m using now:

1. Acquire source I’d like to use in TW. Let’s say it’s a PDF of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1846 classic The Cask of Amontillado.

2. Add the source’s information to Zotero (a reference management database that organizes sources, very popular with academics.)

3. Use the Better Bibtex plugin for Zotero to force stable citekeys, which prevents the cite key from changing if I edit the entry later, which prevents having to edit TW and the source file name later. I use lastnameYYYYtitleword.

4. Edit the source file’s filename to the new citekey, and file in the correct folder. (Usually Collections > Books - PDF or Collections > Books - EPUB, but I have more folders.) So the new file is named and located as follows: Collections>Books - PDF>poe1846amontillado.pdf Now I can easily find the file if I can find it in Zotero, and I can also find the file easily if I know the author’s last name using the file browser.

5. Next, I export a .bib file from Zotero for import into TW via Refnotes. This creates a source tiddler with the same citekey as a title, which is handy. So now I have naming consistency across all areas: in TW, in Zotero, and in the file name.

6. When I make a tiddler in TW that references a source, I put its citekey in a field at the bottom of the tiddler called “citekey.” So if I’m writing a note about something, or copying a passage over to a tiddler, then there will be something in the “citekey” field at the bottom of the tiddler.

PROS:

• Very thorough way to track sources.
• Zotero is helpful for organizing and tracking sources, and makes it easy to group sources together for projects. It should also make creating bibliographies a breeze.
• Consistent naming convention makes things very organized and easy to find.
• If I use my classification system and the sources system, then I end up with a very thorough trail of where I got an idea from and how it evolved over time.

CONS:

• Time consuming and boring to work on. Once the data is in, though, it’s easy.
• I’m not sure I’ll ever have to actually generate a bibliography, so it may be a lot of work for nothing.
• I have several hundred to over a thousand potential sources, and the idea of putting them all in Zotero is highly demotivating.

If I were an academic, I would be all over this, since my job would revolve around being able to produce sources. I’m just a hobbyist right now, though, so I could just ditch the whole bibliography management scheme and save myself a lot of grief if I just stuck with a consistent naming scheme and used a citekey field in TW.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to keep with it or not.

[TW_Tones]

This raises the idea of “functional” or “Semantic” subtiddlers. In your example you are abstracting questions/data/solution from the current tiddler and creating matching subtiddlers. I suppose the next question arises is how do these “functional subtiddlers” then interact with the parent tiddler?

Subtiddlers are but one particular area of “programmatic or user interface title names selection”. However what I think we can see subtiddlers in particular, those that build a “compound tiddler” should in some way always have a “functional” relationship to the parent. And the naming of subtiddlers comes from or is named by that functional relationship.

This to help us move forward I think it is of great value to somewhat divide “programmatic or user interface title names selection” into subTiddlers and not subTiddlers. However the next question is when is a new tiddler, with an automatic or semi-automatic title not a subTiddler?

• Eg; I create task tiddler, then most likely they are subTiddler of a project or domain (Work / Personal )

Can anyone think of examples of new tiddler titles that DO NOT have a relationship loose, strict or directly related to another tiddler?

[TW_Tones]

Thanks for sharing @ahollar I appreciate your effort. One thing I get from your post that may have a lot to bare on the Original Topic (OT) is also related to my reply to Mohammad, is the idea of folder and other categorisation methods. Basically it follows that an automatic tiddler title can be formed from the information we would use to file or categorise that tiddler.

But do we have a “What comes first the chicken or the egg?” problem?,

Specifically “What comes first the title of a tiddler or they way we categorise that tiddler?”

[CodaCoder]

@TW_Tones

Can anyone think of examples of new tiddler titles that DO NOT have a relationship loose, strict or directly related to another tiddler?

Probably. But right now I’m struggling to grasp your chosen taxonomy and the underlying etymology.

Certainly I think of groupings of tiddlers as being of the same “family”:

  – “section” tiddlers could be viewed as subtiddlers of a notional “chapter” tiddler, for example.

  – tiddlers talking about CSS tricks I view as part of the CSS family of tiddlers – not sure they’re subtiddlers.

[ahollar]

I think the answer to your question, @TW_Tones , at least in my current implementation, is that I first determine the type of tiddler I’m dealing with, then I name it. So:

• If I am using a tiddler as a place to keep information about a source: then I use lastnameYYYYtitleword.
• If the tiddler holds a passage that I took from a book chapter, short story, or poem, then I use the title of book and chapter, title of the story, or title of the poem, respectively, to title the tiddler. Then I provide a citekey in a field of the passage’s tiddler to the source tiddler lastnameYYYtitleword.
• If I’m making notes about a passage, then I am (right now, and I’m not sure I’ll keep doing things this way) then I use the same title as the passage then append the type of note at the end, such as Book Name Chapter 03 Vocabulary or Book Name Chapter 10 Notes. I also will put the citekey in the field like the passage. I try to name things so that, if I make a dynamic list by citekey, the list will sort itself sensibly.
• I will also have notes with names of the project I’m doing that act like a dashboard, and those are named on an ad hoc basis, but they’re fairly few in number and that makes them easy to find in the “recent” list.

Does this help? I’m still figuring things out, so a lot of this is subject to change.

[Mohammad]

@ahollar

As requested by @Mohammad , here are my thoughts so far on using cite keys.

Thank you @ahollar! While I found your procedure very interesting, but it is time consuming as you said!

As I use the online resources normally for papers! I just export the citation and most of the time there is a doi! so, in Tiddlywiki I can click the doi to open the resource!

I don’t remember, but I think @Mark_S sometime ago developed a code to scan a folder of pdfs and create links to them in Tiddlywiki! May be it can automate part of your procedure.

[Mohammad]

Hi Tony!

Soren has used some nice naming convention in his TZK edition!