I’m conflicted here, because you made some great points that I’m excited to think about/try, but you’re so angry! I guess I’m just joining an ongoing decimal-themed flame war from many years ago, lol. For example, this:
“ Dewey Decimal[0] (which is what JD cribs almost everything conceptually from)”
seems a little uncharitable! It’s pretty openly a specialization/variation on DD, and I’d be surprised if many people on here (or really in the culture at all) weren’t vaguely aware of DD from their school days. So “crib” seems a little pejorative imo
Re: substance, I’d be interested in a clarification if you find the time: why do codes for individual files bother you so?
You need to differentiate them somehow, and the first pure-DD solution I found doesn’t apply at all:
“ we also add to the end the first three letters of the author's last name (or, if no author is given, then the first three letters of the title). In our example, the author is James Brock, so BRO is added to the end of the Dewey call number to get 595.789/BRO.” - https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/SEHS/ERL/Document...
It just seems plainly helpful to have numbers before files, especially for ones that you’ll be returning to and/or recreating for other projects a lot, e.g. documents within your usual project management system.
Eh, it's by and large annoyance with a lot of these "here's how to get organized" guides. I have a bad tendency to kinda accrue files and as a result need these types of organizatorial systems to make sense of it all.
The problem is that rather than being descriptive (as in "this works for me, see what works for you"), lots of these organization guides are prescriptive, which helps pretty much only the person who wrote them to begin with. It gets really grating after a while, especially if they offer things like templates that are a pain to actually refit for personal use. (Which to be fair, JD doesn't do, but the author very clearly has that type of workflow in mind - older versions of the JD website straight up recommended using airtable for organizing stuff, template iirc included.)
My annoyance with numbering individual files in JD in this case is pretty much the result of "nobody else works in your Dewey decimal system". Like, start working with any kinda enterprise-y management tool and you'll very quickly learn that a lot of software is not written with JD in mind because they assume control over an entire folder and organize it in a way that makes sense to them. That is a problem that often combines with when you start receiving external files which are a folder of dependencies with one file you can open in the aforementioned tool. Yes, you can often spend time to edit the internals to "correct" that document to the Dewey decimal system, but that creates extra overhead and can also sometimes gravely annoy the other person if the document has to be send back and forth a couple times.
In that case, it's just way more straightforward to assign a unique ID to the parent folder instead of spending upwards of 30 minutes fiddling with every incoming file.
As for adding author last name - that's just for shelf organization in libraries, libraries sort all books on author/title alphabetical level. DDC just adds another organizational layer on top of that for scientific books (most fiction and (auto)biographies usually ends up organized outside Dewey entirely for practical reasons). You can have multiple 595.789/BRO in a single library (dictionaries for example with multiple books will have the same DDC).
“ Dewey Decimal[0] (which is what JD cribs almost everything conceptually from)”
seems a little uncharitable! It’s pretty openly a specialization/variation on DD, and I’d be surprised if many people on here (or really in the culture at all) weren’t vaguely aware of DD from their school days. So “crib” seems a little pejorative imo
Re: substance, I’d be interested in a clarification if you find the time: why do codes for individual files bother you so?
You need to differentiate them somehow, and the first pure-DD solution I found doesn’t apply at all:
“ we also add to the end the first three letters of the author's last name (or, if no author is given, then the first three letters of the title). In our example, the author is James Brock, so BRO is added to the end of the Dewey call number to get 595.789/BRO.” - https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/SEHS/ERL/Document...
It just seems plainly helpful to have numbers before files, especially for ones that you’ll be returning to and/or recreating for other projects a lot, e.g. documents within your usual project management system.