Zettelkasten
A note-taking method built around small atomic notes that link to each other.
The Zettelkasten (“slip box” in German) is a personal knowledge management method developed by sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The core idea: each note holds one atomic thought, identified by a unique number, and notes link to each other to form a network of ideas rather than a tree.
Why atomic notes
A note that does one thing can be reused in many contexts. A note that tries to be a chapter can only be one chapter.
When a note grows past a few paragraphs, it usually wants to be split. The cue is often that you can write a new title that doesn’t repeat the old one — which is the cue that you’ve drifted into a new topic.
Linking
The link is the unit of structure. There’s no folder tree. The wiki is just notes plus their links. See Distributed Systems for an unrelated example of the same “everything is a network of nodes” idea.
Backlinks
A note shows you who links to it, not just who it links to. That inversion is what makes the wiki feel like a network and not a tree. See Backlinks for the implementation notes.