Restructuring Old Notes
Restructuring Old Notes
When reinventing the wheel and coming up with a new clever way to structure notes or new info to add to the YAML, how do you treat your old notes?
Do you go back and apply the new format or do you just leave them as is only looking forward?
If you revisit old notes, do you have a strategy?
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions.
This is definitely one of those questions that's hard to give a definitive answer to. It really depends on what you're using the YAML for and whether not having it on all relevant notes would prevent you from accomplishing your goal.
Let's say I have my watched movies in Obsidian. I have basic YAML like IMDB link, genre, and year released. Later, I decide I want to see what directors I have watched the most. In this instance, not having the director YAML on all of my movies is something I would want to fix.
Continuing the above example, I would do two things to make adapting the new structure easier. First, I would update my template for movies to automatically include that field for any new movies I create. Second, I would probably use Dataview to create a utility page to identify movies with no director. The logic of the query would basically be "select all from movies where no director". That way I could systematically update my existing notes without having to look through all of them individually.
Hopefully this gives you a couple of ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, let me know!
Thank you! This is pretty much how I go about it, but the manual work load is still great.
In my case it is the adoption of LATCH, a concept I only encountered after I had already been using Obsidian for some time. Not to mention that my LATCH template already changed once or twice, until I found what works for me, but this still leaves the possibility open for future changes to it and another round of mass edits. Deciding on a more fundamental level, if and how or if at all I should address these changes is a question that I have not yet found a decisive answer to.
Why would you want to restructure your noted just to add more meta data?
I just leave it as it is. But my notes are categories in their own vaults so there is never a need to Refactor previous notes to a new form as they don't interact with each other anyway.
Well it's not just meta data. I write only the bare necessities in an actual YAML header, the rest of the front matter goes into a comment section below that. This gives me the option to add links as meta data. What I would like to do is to embed older notes with LATCH. This would help with cataloging and indexing, which would in turn help with identifying merge-able topics, relating topics and reviewing notes.
For some types of metadata, I've used dataview to make a list of notes missing the key fields I want, then I can go back from time to time when I'm bored, and add the new data.
I also use this to summarize things like meeting notes after a day or so to digest what I heard.