About this site

Meta data

Each note is assigned meta data to help classify the note's maturity, importance, likelihood, and estimated lifespan.

Maturity

A measure of how well developed a note is. Content on this site progresses along 4 stages of maturity which I've named after four main phases of tree growth:

  • 🌱 Seedling - Initial ideas without much additional context or elaboration.
  • 🌿 Sapling - Rough drafts, ideas which have began to be developed more deeply.
  • 🌳 Mature - ...
  • 🍂 Decline - Notes which have become obsolete or irrelevant

Importance

A measure of how trivial or important the content of any specific note is. Borrowed from Gwern Branwen's website, the importance of a note is measured on a five point scale:

  1. Not at all important
  2. Low importance
  3. Neutral (or, important)
  4. Very important
  5. Extremely important

Likelihood

A measure of how well supported the note is, or how likely I believe that the overall ideas in the note are correct. The concept of assigning a subjective likelihood is also borrowed from Gwern Branwen's website, and is based on the Kesselman List of Estimative Words:

  1. Impossible
  2. Remote
  3. Highly unlikely
  4. Unlikely
  5. Possible
  6. Likely
  7. Highly likely
  8. Certain

Last Updated

The time when the note was last edited or updated.

Lifespan

A tool to combat link rot and obsolescence, the lifespan is a relative measure of how long I expect the content on a note will be accurate for. This is a loose guess I am making based on the subject matter of the note.

I plan on creating a script which will automatically compare the last edit date and lifespan to the current date, and will automatically recategorize any mature notes as in decline if they've exceeded that interval.