reply to u/pakizh at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16vgxy7/ids_or_common_names_for_notes/

Keyword search was definitely available in Luhmann's lifetime. Here's the link to the digitized version of Luhmann's keyword index: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V. Versions of this sort of indexing go back at least to John Locke's method for indexing commonplace books in 1685 (in French) and 1706 (in English). See: https://archive.org/details/13925922180LockeCommonplaceBook/mode/2up for the 1706 version. In a zettelkasten context, instead of indexing page numbers, one simply numbers their index cards and the method works exactly the same. (One could also think of it as creating a library card catalog for one's ideas instead of their books—again, using a personalized numbering system instead of the standardized Dewey Decimal System which is used for books.)

In paper versions, the numbers serve two purposes:

• Allowing the ideas to be indexed and searched for and found again. Full text search in digital contexts may be easier in some instances, but these sorts of searches may not scale well over thousands of notes and may return hundreds of results which need to be looked through to find the correct one. As a result, even good indexing in digital can pay off well in the long run.
• Placing similar ideas next to each other (when filed using numbers) allows areas of interest to build up in one's note collection. This also creates what one might call "soft links" between ideas (versus more direct, hard links using [[WikiLinks]] or explicit links to specific numbered cards). These neighborhoods of ideas eventually build up to something interesting in aggregation. Without these sorts of (decimal or alpha-numeric) numbers, it's more difficult to create this affordance in digital applications (and one has to be more vigilant for orphaned notes). One can use tags or category names in Obsidian along with the graph view to approximate some of this affordance, but it requires more work on the part of the user. Prepending sortable numbers onto the titles of notes can allow these neighborhoods to be more visible in the sidebar folder view found in many digital tools.

Some will suggest or use some sort of date/timestamp number as a unique identifier, but doing this generally has little or no value and most digital systems will automatically add date/time creation and modification timestamps to notes anyway if those are of interest or value.

More details: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/

Knowing these potential affordances, try things out for a while to see how they work for you and then decide to continue or change your practice to suit your own needs.

I would argue against this. Many digital gardeners use publication dates and even last updated dates on their posts. Time in particular can be an incredibly important datum with regard to providing useful context to one's content.

Now Hypothesis annotations not only show when they were created, but also a second timestamp if they were edited.

This seems like a particular flash point for the SBTF work. The data is temporal and the collection work is temporal but there seems to be a gap between structuring the two temporalities into the final data product. Harvesting date/timestamps and agreeing to formats/standards are rarely incorporated into the initial deployment instructions. The value of temporality often seems implied when it might need to be made more explicit for making sense of the data and the constant need for updating/filtering/sorting/analysis.

Yeah, I've got some thoughts here.

I added: (define-key org-mode-map (kbd "<f8> t") 'insert-active-timestamp) as well as: (define-key org-mode-map (kbd "<f8> T") 'toggle-insert-active-timestamp)

I haven't tested it yet We'll see