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Categorize by what content is, not why you made it

This is a knowledge-management practice

How knowledge gets organised, independently of any tool that stores it.

While setting up this bundle, two findings - a security review of agent-wiki and a bug hit while ingesting into it - both got filed under knowledge_management. That was wrong: neither is about managing knowledge. They landed there because that is what I happened to be doing when I found them, not because of what they actually are.

Corrected: Security Analysis of Agent Wiki (awiki) is a security review, so it belongs in investigations. awiki title extraction breaks on frontmatter-led source files is a finding, so it belongs in findings. Both stand on their own merits as durable, hard-won knowledge. Neither needed the knowledge-management framing to justify existing.

That second correction was itself half-done, and the second half is the more instructive one. The bug first went to tools/, on the reasoning that a tool defect belongs with the tool. But "about a tool" is the domain, not the nature: the page is a finding that happens to concern a tool, exactly as the sysctl finding beside it is a finding that happens to concern Linux. Filing by domain put two natures in one directory and produced a folder tree that grew a slot per subject, which is the explosion Split orthogonal classification axes across folders and tags describes. The nature is Finding; the tool rides along as a tag. Rejecting the circumstance of discovery is necessary but not sufficient - the answer you land on has to be a nature, and a subject is not one.

The rule

Directory = what the content fundamentally is. Links = why it exists, and the context that produced it.

Do not let the circumstance of discovery leak into the category. If you are mid-way through building or adopting a tool and learn something, ask "what is this, independent of what I was doing" before filing it. If the answer is "a research finding", "a tool fix" or "a technique", it goes in the directory that matches that nature, tagged for findability. The narrative of why you were looking gets its own page and links out to the substantive findings, rather than absorbing them: here that page is Running this knowledge base on awiki, which is where both findings above are cited as evidence, and where neither of them lives.

This generalises past awiki: any knowledge base with fixed-ish categories (directories, topics, notebooks) is vulnerable to the same drift, since "what was I doing" is always the most available and least correct classification signal in the moment of saving.

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