It’s perhaps not precise to think of “Org-roam folk” having a single mental model and I think that each one of us has a different, somewhat overlapping, mental model about their notes in Org-roam. I find it useful to think of three typical modes of usage of Org-roam as follows. They are based on my observation on this forum.
- Task management
- Information / knowledge repository
- Thinking tool
This is an awesome write-up. This will be very helpful for new users. Do you think you could extend / move this some more discover able place (separate thread, blog, …)? Or now that I think about it, I actually believe that the manual would be the right place. The manual currently has Section 2 “Target Audience”, which touches upon the flexibility of org-roam (“It is our belief that note-taking workflows are extremely personal, and there is no one tool that’s perfect for you.”) but then mentions only Zettelkasten. Expanding this with a few examples of use cases like the ones you mentioned here would be helpful for some users who may think that org-roam is primarily targeted at the Zettelkasten workflow. I don’t think it’s primarily targeted at any workflow, while it really doesn’t dictate a workflow.
I’m somewhat biased here because this discussion reminds me of myself when I started to get in touch with org-roam (see my thread: Is it wrong to think of org-roam as a wiki?). Back then I felt org-roam is “org with better linking” and I still feel that way. My use cases of org-roam are really primarily 1 and 2 and only a tiny bit of 3, so back then I wasn’t sure if org-roam is the right tool for me.