This is definitely one of those questions that’s hard to give a definitive answer to. It really depends on what you’re using the YAML for and whether not having it on all relevant notes would prevent you from accomplishing your goal.

Let’s say I have my watched movies in Obsidian. I have basic YAML like IMDB link, genre, and year released. Later, I decide I want to see what directors I have watched the most. In this instance, not having the director YAML on all of my movies is something I would want to fix.

Continuing the above example, I would do two things to make adapting the new structure easier. First, I would update my template for movies to automatically include that field for any new movies I create. Second, I would probably use Dataview to create a utility page to identify movies with no director. The logic of the query would basically be “select all from movies where no director”. That way I could systematically update my existing notes without having to look through all of them individually.

Hopefully this gives you a couple of ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, let me know!

Great insight! This is one of those real “a-ha” moments that keeps me using Obsidian today.

One concept that backlinking and a bottom-up note structure gave me insight on was actually this exact concept of “emergence.” The idea that out of a large amount of chaos, order and structure can naturally form. I’ve been able to connect it to everything from philosophy to mental health to natural language and it’s very exciting.

I am a person with late diagnosed ADHD/autism so my life breeds chaos. The assurance that you can just write without having to worry about where the note goes is so powerful.

Nicole van der Hoeven is a great resource! If you’re looking for more YouTubers, I would recommend Artem Kirsanov. He has a couple of videos on bottom-up note taking/zettelkasten, but also has some really interesting conceptual videos on how people learn and retain knowledge. He’s a computational neuroscience student but he’s great at being interesting and not overly dry about his explanations. My primary Obsidian resource on YouTube is Bryan Jenks. I’ve basically stolen most of his setup because he also has the same pain points I do (namely having terrible working memory and issues starting tasks).

Good luck and thanks for the post!

If you’re using regex I’m assuming you know of utilities like Regex 101 to check your syntax.

With JS-styled regex the entire statement is enclosed in slashes. /parent:: $/ should have the desired effect here.

I second DataView for these kinds of tasks as the plugin revolves around YAML frontmatter. I have a utility note called “notes with cleanable metadata” that has a bunch of these DataView queries that update in real time.

Good luck!

Check out this handy link courtesy of the Obisidan discord. Syncing between devices can be somewhat cumbersome if you don’t want to pay for Obsidian Sync, but a lot of people (myself included) have success with using FolderSync on android with whatever cloud service you have your notes on.