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Comment by tasuki | Hacker News Reader

> I still love Obsidian. And I’m planning on using it again. From scratch. And with a deeper level of curation and care - not as a second brain, but as a workspace for the one I already have.

Different, but reminds me of something I have regrettably witnessed at several of my workplaces: "Our knowledge base is in disarray. It's disorganised, full of out of date information, and it's hard to find the things you need. Let's discard it and create a better one!" Then the new one quickly falls into disarray just the same. Now you have to search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge bases.

I wonder why people are so resistant to organising whatever they have already. I'm surely never deleting my personal knowledge base. I might rework parts of it in the future...

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Organizing your stuff means starting a big unpleasant task today. Starting a new knowledge base lets you have fun today, and you cross your fingers that future you will eat their vegetables and diligently keep it up to date forever.

Something you could get an LLM to do for you

I spent half of last week updating an old guide and dokumentation page for an internal product. 20 people have used this guide and noticed the factual errors. Nobody wanted to make the edits.

> Let's discard it and create a better one!" Then the new one quickly falls into disarray just the same. Now you have to search two badly-organized, partially out of date knowledge bases.

I could blame the idea of moving to a new knowledge base here, or say it was a waste of time, but instead I'm going to blame a stark refusal to make a schedule for a simple job and then follow it. "Discard it and create a better one" is very easy to understand. If you still have two after a few weeks you failed at a fundamental level. The problem wasn't the idea.

> The problem wasn't the idea.

I'll double down: yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base because you do not understand it well enough. No one does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.

The best you can do as an individual is to gradually improve your corner of the knowledge base. The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with the new one?

> yes, the initial idea is the problem. In a large organization, you can never discard the old knowledge base because you do not understand it well enough. No one does. No one knows which pieces of the old knowledge base are useful to whom. So it sticks around indefinitely.

If you don't understand an entry you can always copy it. It's not a very difficult task to make sure the new system starts with the same information as the old one.

> The idea that "we'll create a new one and it'll be up-to-date forever" is unrealistic, it's wishful thinking. If we weren't able to do it with the old one, why think we'll be able to do it with the new one?

This is a flaw with the actual idea, and a pretty big one, but it's a totally different flaw from failing to delete the old knowledge base.

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