I use TiddlyWiki as personal knowledge management software to store notes on resources I gather from the internet. I have a field called “format” with values like: webpage, article, book, report, blog, podcast, and code. Looking at the new types of resources from recent years, I would like to revise these format types to cover more current ones. For example, an online book, a GitHub repository, or something like the “Scientific Python Lectures” from Scientific Python Lectures — Scientific Python Lectures. Please advise and propose new formats.
Principles for Revising Formats
Granularity vs. usability: Too many formats can overwhelm; too few can blur distinctions. Aim for ~12–15 well-chosen categories.
Medium + intent: Capture both how the resource is delivered (e.g., video, repo, dataset) and what it’s for (e.g., tutorial, reference, interactive).
Digital-native formats: Include modern structures like MOOCs, GitHub repos, and interactive notebooks.
Extensibility: Allow new formats to be added without breaking old notes.
My only nudge (perhaps a bit selfishly, looking toward future projects?) is that you make this set a superset of the kinds of types recognized within bibtex](Complete list of BibTeX entry types [with examples] - BibTeX.com). These include things like booklet, conference, manual, phdthesis, incollection (meaning contribution to an anthology, etc.) — which may not be useful to you for your current project, but which are part of the same large data-space as whatever new formats you’d like to add.
Refnotes is already great, and… if you do more to develop your knowledge management stuff with reference to digital resources, I hope the formats will remain compatible!
I think no! For example a Jupyter book, which contains a book and a GitHub repo.
Yes I use tiddler for type like source, people, journal, idea, …
But here I use this as a field.
It depends on the purpose. There is an overarching assumption here that the sources must be tangible.
Coming from the business world, something like a meeting (which may have been face-to-face and unrecorded) is not possible to track in this schema. Academia has these sometimes, especially in psychology where they e.g. the natures experiment disallows the researchers from making fine-grained notes.
It also seems to me to prioritise medium over addressability. Let’s take again the example of a meeting between people. It could be available in the form of:
A video
An audio recording
A transcript
It’s just talking heads though, so I’m not sure if there’s a qualitative difference when the essence of it is in a discussion between participants. Sure, you lose a bit of definition between each one of these (body language, tone of voice) but the information contained in the source probably stays the same.
I appreciate academic citations are medium-first but I question their value outside of those confines. To me it would be more useful to capturesomething that suggests your confidence in it, for example if something is opinionated by its nature (e.g. a first-person feature article) or deliberately attempts to involve multiple points of view and contains self-criticism (e.g. an article in an academic journal).
Why might the medium be useful? As mentioned above, addressability matters - so just like a URL should take you to the right place, I’d expect to be able to validate (and hopefully access) a unique source directly from the citation alone.
I don’t have any answers, but I hope I have helped with reaching one.
Thanks for your input. I agree that focusing on the medium is more important than addressability here. While BibTeX is great for formal resources like papers and books, your point is very relevant for modern, digital knowledge management.