I find virtually every taxonomical system insufficient, whether it's a folder hierarchy, tag cloud, etc. Because of English's profusion of synonyms (on top of n

I find virtually every taxonomical system insufficient, whether it's a folder hierarchy, tag cloud, etc. Because of English's profusion of synonyms (on top of necessarily murky category definitions for the world, generally), finding a consolidating duplicates is its own war of attrition with myself. So I mostly store things in a handful of very broad topical folders and let mdfind (Spotlight) do all the heavy lifting of finding things I need. The filesystem hierarchy isn't “clean” in this case, but it doesn't matter because I rarely need to rely on it for finding what I'm looking for. This system does not lend itself to concordance building, browsing, or evincing topical relations, but I'm rarely needing that outside the domain of a particular use case. So if I'm researching for a paper, for example, I use Zotero to map out connections between bibliographic references. It's a more constrained realm where tag management is less arduous.