One Vault, Not Many

When designing a PKMS, there is sometimes a dilemma over whether to keep a few different databases or put everything into just one. It is useful to approach the question in terms of retrieval rather than storage. The way I see it, there are two schools of thought, "one big vault" and "many vaults", argued at length in a thread on the Obsidian forum. I have a few arguments for the first option.

• The original spirit of the Zettelkasten was a mechanism for unplanned connections. In that view, hoarding is the best thing that can happen to a SlipBox, because it confronts you with your own ideas, the ones that challenge your thinking about a subject rather than confirm it.
• From the information architecture side, one database, no matter how big and messy, helps you focus on building diverse types of retrieval mechanisms that serve the specific needs of different types of projects.
• Splitting into separate vaults locks the data into one specific mechanism, and it increases the risk of duplicate data creeping into multiple vaults with no cheap way of noticing it.

Besides, capture is also easier when you only have one place to store things.

Yours, with the footnotes trimmed,
Zhenia