@JohnPhilpin Thanks for digging these up. I'd seen Nick Ang's articles when he first published them. Most of this list is rife in the digital gardens space with a gardening metaphor that goes back to Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens (1998) and to Mike Caulfield's The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral piece. Maggie Appleton used a version of it fairly early on as did Andy Matuschak. See also links at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book. Most of these levels are evolutionary after the initial work of starting the note has begun. Anecdotally, I've also noticed that many people using that system look at "evergreen" more from the journalistic perspective (an evergreen article) and consider those notes to be longer articles rather than reusable notes in multiple contexts.

But being completely honest the general collecting and tending metaphor goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

He's essentially saying, 'read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own.' As a result of this quote and others similar to it, it's not uncommon to see bees or the equivlaent Latin word apes written or drawn into the margins of Renaisance humanist texts as a sort of "bookmark" annotation by readers of the time. 🐝

Another gradation of note names similar to this is that of Sönke Ahrens with descriptors like fleeting notes, reading notes, literature notes, etc.

The thing I'm looking at in my particular list is the form of the intial note at the level of an annotation made at first reading. These descriptions may be more indicative of what the note may or may not become later on. I've also ranked them a bit from (for me at least) the more important and valuable to the least. Differentiating them at this lower level can be more important as a means of where to focus one's time and energy.

I also tend to take the approach of doing more upfront work than less. Using the gardening metaphor list, I usually intend to get my notes to the seedling/sapling level at the first pass while reading. Usually once they're in my system for a week or so, they should all be at sapling level and then it's a question of linking and crosslinking them and then actually using them in new contexts thereafter.