Beyond disambiguation pages
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sister projects have greatly influenced how I organize my Obsidian vault. This time, I talk about the influence of its disambiguation pages on my vault, and how I adapted some of its ideas to my needs.
Disambiguation pages are awesome
On Wikipedia, there is a type of page known as a “disambiguation” page. You’ve probably seen a link that looks like this: “Obsidian (disambiguation).” Instead of taking you to an article directly (as a redirect or normal link would), you are instead presented with a list of articles.
The articles listed in a disambiguation page all share similar or exact names, with a short description to the side (and in the article title) to help you differentiate the articles and find the one you need. It allows Wikipedia to write about multiple subjects that share names. For Wikipedia, this alone is about as far as it needs to go—really the type of content on Wikipedia is encyclopedia entries.
Where disambiguation alone falls apart
For, say, my Obsidian vault, there may be a variety of content types. An encyclopedia like Wikipedia, a dictionary like Wiktionary, source texts like Wikisource, etc. The astute among you will have noticed that these are just different Wikimedia sister projects all crammed into one vault. And you’d be right.
How do we handle all of these different types of content in the vault at once? Do we cram it all into one note? No! For the various Wikimedia sister projects, Obsidian exists as a Wikipedia article, a Wikidata item, and a Wikimedia Commons category. These are all distinct pages because shoving everything into one document would be messy and impractical.
Maybe keeping everything in one vault is half of my problem here, but I have my reasons for wanting everything in one vault. Since I don’t want to make a bunch of little vaults, disambiguation pages alone clearly will not suffice. If the same subject can live in multiple places, then what I think I need is to have a list somewhere like a disambiguation page to link to all of the pages about just one subject.
The name I’ve personally chosen for this type of page in my vault is a “lens,” influenced largely by how a subject’s appearance in different projects (or content types) changes. It’s kind of like seeing the different ways we talk about the same subject.
What it looks like in practice
I do a lot of my organization with folders. This is because different content types like dictionary entries or encyclopedia articles are not really the same and don’t need to intermingle. Each note is named after its subject and given a unique identifier (usually a date prefix) so file names don’t conflict.
So I’ll have two folders, Dictionary/ and Encyclopedia/. Both have a note titled Markdown in them. A lens page titled Markdown will then briefly explain Markdown at the top so you know you’re looking at the lens for the right subject, and then link to Dictionary/Markdown and Encyclopedia/Markdown.
Maybe it won’t be useful to you. That’s fine, but I hope somebody found this interesting!