Apologies in advance for the length of this essay. I am really hoping that the following comments are taken in the constructive manner they are intended and that the team responds. In another thread, @dstillman made this comment about the future plans/strategy for Zotero:

"We spent a lot of time thinking about this when building the new note editor and ended up deciding that standalone notes should be the mechanism for outlining. You can drag items, annotations, non-annotation PDF text, and other notes into a standalone note and then drag them around as blocks to rearrange them, with all the benefits that a note editor gives you of being able to type around them, flesh them out, add lists and other formatting, etc. The idea is to make it possible to go from annotations to notes to a draft that can be inserted into a document with active Zotero citations....(There is, however, much more we want to do with notes, so what's there now shouldn't be considered the final feature set.)"

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/383545/#Comment_383545

Zotero is, in my mind, clearly the best-of-class reference manager in addition to the benefits of its being free and open-source. There are other excellent apps for notetaking, outlining, drafting, and revising text, and Zotero wisely integrates with many of them. Is Zotero's ambition to expand its functionality to be a platform for some of these functions? It seems from @dstillman's comment that the answer is yes, and it would be fantastic if it was able to do these things as well as existing apps.

My concern is this: there has been, over the last several years, an absolute explosion of activity and interest in notetaking, outlining, and Zettlekasten tools that are neither reference managers nor traditional word processors, but fill the gap between them, and offer functionality that most researchers never even realized they wanted but now can't imagine living without. Most of these offer immensely useful customizability, automation, search/filter,and linking and backlinking features that Zotero should never aim to duplicate because they don't make sense for a reference manager and, with the speed of development of these other platforms, Zotero would never catch up on in any case.

When I first learned about Zotero's development of internal pdf reader and new note system, honestly, I was unhappy. I thought, "Why is Zotero spending development time reinventing the wheel? There are many other tools that let users annotate pdfs and search notes and Zotero has a lot of other things to improve." Of course it is nice in principle to have everything in one tool, but users will always need multiple apps, so fewer apps required is a nice-to-have at best. Now that I have seen the pdf reader and note system, I feel mixed. On the one hand, it does seem great in many ways. On the other hand, Zotero is potentially at a turning point and it may go down (in my mind) a suboptimal road.

I am concerned that the Zotero dev team may have a slightly "siloed" view of user needs, which is *not* a criticism, but is just something that happens to any team focused on making a great product. Zotero had to integrate with word processors, did it early, and they are now talking about closing the gap between Zotero managing references and word processing an article by adding outlining.

The problem is that notetaking and outlining capabilities have radically changed in the last several years and Zotero will never catch up in those areas. So in my view it makes much more sense for Zotero to do with notes and annotations what it previously did with citations: focus on seamless and maximally efficient interoperability with other programs that are focused on and better suited for manipulating, organizing, and searching notes, as word processors are for drafting and revision. Zotero's annotation system is much better off seamlessly integrating with existing notetaking and outlining apps then trying to duplicate those functions.

AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, there are many functions central to reference management that Zotero has not had the capacity to improve even though they have been requested for many years. These are things that users *can't* do though other programs at least not without command-line tools. Things such as: proper syncing and merging between personal and group libraries, better group library permissions, batch editing of item data (like changing all `Place: N.Y.` to `Place: NY`), and other requests that devs have not rejected but simply have said "no one is able to do that now" or "no one is interested in that now". I would rather have batch data editing 100x more than an additional way to annotate pdfs, which I can already do in many ways. This is not a slam about the hard work that went into the new pdf reader, which I like and have already given many suggestions about improving, but it is hard to see a new "hot" feature like this when I assume that adding it took 100s of hours away from potentially figuring out how to batch edit data. As someone who has tried to work using group libraries, and spent dozens of hours manually editing data item by item, I can't understand how a reference manager dev team don't see these as a solvable and priority problems (of course, I'm not on the team, I may be missing something).

The devs have made it very clear over the many years I've used Zotero that they do not want to pick features based on user "votes", and I get their position and lhave come to terms with it, but I am hoping that they will agree that Zotero should focus on features most central to Zotero's ability to be a great, flexible, easy-to-use *reference manager* first, and focus on *interoperability* second, and only *then* focus on adding functionality to Zotero such as outlining or drafting that is already available and widely used in other free and/or open-source programs.

Finally, perhaps Zotero developers are regularly interacting with vibrant notetaking/annotating/outlining/knowledge management communities, such as those around Roam Research, Athens, Obsidian, Logseq, Checktivist, Freeplane, Transno, Readwise, Hypothes.is, etc. that live on Discord servers and dedicated forums, but if not, I strongly encourage them to do so. There, they will find are lots of intelligent contributors who, like the Zotero team, have expertise in knowledge management and huge numbers of users want to use these apps with Zotero. Many of them are already doing so, and I would love to see Zotero move forward with them in a coordinated way to meet user needs rather than in an isolated way being focused on the early workflow of just Zotero + word processor.

To be clear, I know Zotero has lots of export options, a public API, answers questions on the forum, and is happy to have contributors who would like to add these features. Nonetheless, the question is not whether there is an alternate way for others to solve core problems like personal/group library sync or batch export by learning to program, the question is should the core Zotero team focus on becoming an outliner/drafting program before addressing some of the key, known, agreed-upon gaps in its reference management capabilities. I'm not trying to tell the Zotero team what to do, I am just asking the team to address these decade-old gaps and to develop the notetaking system towards interoperability with markdown-based editors rather than building out the notetaking feature set in a less-interoperable way.

...continued next message!