Tags are an easy way to relate heterogenous items, but they’re quite a low-signal way of describing relationships.
All items with a given tag are presented as being related… but it’s hard to see how. They’re just a jumbled, unordered list.
Some of those items are more relevant to a particular tag’s topic than others, so we should Prefer explicit associations to inferred associations.
Some of those items have only a few sentences touching on a tag, but the tag is associated with the whole item. We should Prefer fine-grained associations. Relatedly, tags are often pretty vague or broad. Better to link to associate ideas more precisely.
And sometimes, it would be very helpful to have a few words of context about why an item relates to a particular tag. We should Prefer labeled associations.
Edges linking nodes in information systems (e.g. Evergreen notes should be densely linked) should themselves be labeled in some way which contextualizes the association. It’s often not enough to say “X is related to Y”: better to say “X goes into more detail about Y in the context of Z.”
The extra context will be a cue for your memory or evaluation of the linked material, which will help you effectively navigate the knowledge graph and retrace your former thought processes.