134 lines
6.0 KiB
Markdown
134 lines
6.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: About the wiki
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---
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## Why?
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There has been a recent trend to set up [[zettelkasten]]s, which got me to
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look around and see how other people handled their knowledge using a wiki.
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Personal wiki articles are often short, and the focus is more on browsing
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around and discovering new links between ideas.
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Going public-first instead of private-first is also a trend, with wikis on
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Git repos or special websites like Andy Matuschak's [[evergreen]] notes.
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Going public encourages curiosity, invites others to notice what you want
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to learn on or what you know and give you their input, and inspires others.
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It feels less like a waste of time.
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I initially started a private wiki using Vimwiki, as I just needed a space
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to store random ideas and notes and wanted something I felt more in control
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of than something like HedgeDoc or CryptPad, and something that I could edit
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with a proper text editor and not a web browser.
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I decided to move to a public wiki for various reasons:
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* Some pages in my private wiki were worthy of being published, but did not
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really fit as blog posts on my french blog or on my other sites.
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* Most pages did not fit as blog posts because a blog post gives the feel of
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something becoming permanent, becoming something you cannot go back to edit
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on. Posting a journal of sorts about your research on a topic to circumvent
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this issue just makes it much harder for someone to read your results, as
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they need to read through the entire archive.
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* Publishing online makes it feel, for me, that an idea I have, a thought,
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anything I write will not be lost.
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* Publishing makes my writing more worth it than just writing for myself.
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* All the arguments mentioned in other personal wikis, blog articles about
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personal wikis, research about personal knowledge management, blog articles
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about blogging, etc., all apply here too.
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## Links
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* <https://github.com/chrisman/knowledge/wiki>
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* <https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/>
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* <https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow#similar-wikis-i-liked>
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* <https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes>
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* <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/science-managing-our-digital-stuff>
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* <https://sive.rs/dj>
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* <https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden>
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* <https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/>
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## Software choice
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Wikis that use relational databases or non-human-editable formats go against
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my new ethics on web services: the most static possible, and the less risky
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if [[mountain]] goes down, even if i do not set up anything for backups.
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Wikis that would be to annoying to use (not available on every device, not
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available offline, …) would make me give up earlier, so the choice of
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software is pretty crucial I want to keep up this practice.
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What follows is probably pretty harsh, biased, and not well thought-out enough,
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and that's just how most of my software decisions go anyway :D
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Paper
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: Basically a Zettelkasten.
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I would not have access to it on the go, would not be able to search quickly,
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and would not be able to publish easily, but I would definitely not have the
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UX or modern tech issues I have with everything else.
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Vimwiki
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: Does not use Markdown by default, but well integrated with Vim. I tried it
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out for a bit and I actually do not use most of it, so I found out I was just
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fine with regular Markdown.
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TiddlyWiki
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: I had tried it for a fiction writing project, to describe the entire lore
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a la Wikia. The UI is far from being uniform since everything is a plugin,
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and it is pretty resource-heavy and requires Node.js; the software does not
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easily get out of your way for you to just focus on writing.
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Org-mode
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: I have yet to find something that cannot be structured using Org-mode, and
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there are many Org-mode-based software out there, but having to learn Emacs
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implies that I will very quickly give up on that.
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MediaWiki
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: Definitely not text-file-based, can be pretty heavy to host compared to all
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my sites. Promotes long-form writing when most personal wikis tend to have
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shorter articles and more links, similarly to a Zettelkasten.
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[Weewiki](https://pbat.ch/wiki/weewiki/)
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: Interesting, and it uses literate programming which I like, but it still
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uses Org-mode and a binary format.
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[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/)
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: Proprietary, paid, and it looks like the UIs you get from Electron apps
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so I expect it to be too resource-heavy.
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[Zettelkasten](http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/) (the software, not the method)
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: Uses Java and seems to use its own format, not just regular text files.
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[Neuron](https://neuron.zettel.page/)
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: Interesting, but felt too complex at the time I started this wiki for what
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I expected to need.
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[Dendron](https://wiki.dendron.so/)
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: Hierarchical, while what got me more interested in a system such as the
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Zettelkasten was the ability to spawn relationships between random unrelated
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items (which would not be hierachically related at all). Also requires
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Visual Studio Code, which means it will be resource-heavy.
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## Goals
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I am currently moving most of my private Vimwiki-based wiki into this public
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wiki or into other places such as my notebooks, my archives, or other sites
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on the cybrecluster.
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I want to try to use this wiki more as a tool for research than as yet another
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place to publish things, and instead publish the completed research on my
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French blog, as I did for the [Chinese date parsing](./cn-date.html) for
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example.
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I am reading *How to Take Smart Notes* by Sönke Ahrens, a book that introduces
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to the Zettelkasten, and am now considering adding a "reference" folder in this
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wiki for various blog articles, books, etc. that I might stumble upon and find
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interesting thoughts on, to reproduce the reference system mentioned in that
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book. One blog post, for which I had written an incomplete two thousand word
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draft, then gave up on it, could benefit from that.
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## Implementation notes
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This wiki has an [everything](./everything.html) page that gets generated from
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the XML output mode of the `tree` command. I wrote an XSD for it to better
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document the format: [tree XSD](./xsd/tree.xsd)
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