> I just got into it two days ago
This is the rub. I started a tiddlywiki last year, and stuck with it for several months, but now it has fallen to the wayside as too cumbersome.
This is the rub. I started a tiddlywiki last year, and stuck with it for several months, but now it has fallen to the wayside as too cumbersome.
I've been in a number of firms with wiki knowledge systems. In 100% of the cases it was a wasteland of derelict knowledge that had been abandoned and was usually much more destructive than beneficial.
No one was going to undertake the process of keeping it up to date, and at the same time the emergent organization/structure of information was constantly evolving, and wikis are terrible at evolving with that unless you literally have people whose sole job is making templates deciding on the ontology, etc.
Similarly, countless people have tried to organize their lives into tools like wiki. And in the early days it seems magical. I suspect the failure rate would be somewhere barely under 100% at the one month mark.
It's like you're about to tell me that exercising doesn't pay off because it's hard to stick with a strategy. "Heh, let's see if he's still doing pushups in a year."
You don't seem to realize you're just describing literally all systems. How organized is everyone's filesystem and ~/Documents folder? It's pure chaos with the only sweet release being that you might not carry it over when you upgrade computers and get to start from scratch.
Will I be maintaining my localhost wiki in a year? I don't know. But it's worth a shot. After two days it's already 1000x organized than even my best efforts so far.
Is it for everyone? Nothing is for everyone.
But your comment seems to suggest that you think the alternative to <organization strategy> is organized data which obviously isn't the case.
What you will realize is that there is no perfect one-size-fits-all strategy. All you can do is try things and see if they work for you, and see if you stick with them years later.
So, for today, I recommend trying some localhost wiki options in your battle against chaos. If it doesn't work for you, so what?
The take away is clearly "things that work in the small often don't work in the large. If you're taking life advice, take it from someone who has done something for a while and had a reasonable experience.".
Someone crowing about their two day experience is...well...
This applies to all sorts of similar enthusiastic advice. Intermittent napping. Standing desks. The Dvorak keyboard. Drinking your coffee with butter. New diets. Going without the internet. Meditating. Taking up karate. Working in parks. Whatever. There's a lot of wisdom and knowledge among them, but it isn't coming from the guy who just started.
If someone is giving a sales pitch for a lifestyle change based upon a tiny experience, they are often doing it because they think converting others makes it more real/more likely to yield the change they want. It doesn't work that way.
Try things. Try lots of things. Save evangelizing until you maybe have a real experience?
I get it, you're mad that I admitted I only have two days of experience while telling people how to get started in one of the most important software platforms in the world (it's how Wikipedia works) -- I'm not exactly making new sounds on this. Maybe you're fine with my install instructions, but I went too far (for your tastes) when I said it was promising so far. And you thought this behavior needed to be called out by your "Dunning-Kruger in the wild" meme account.
I don't think I've misinterpreted the situation, I just find it a bit sad and I wonder how much you think you've added to the discussion. That you run that account, you must think: "quite a bit!" I'll leave that one up to the audience.
You are irrationally hostile. My comments are not for your edification or service, and this is a shared platform where multiple people are reading and deriving value, each comment kicking off different thoughts and conversations. If you take this so incredibly personally, that's a you problem.
Your internalization and repeated attacks are bizarre. But you do you.
The only thing I’ve ever heard of working on this time scale is plain text files. Maybe with some tool over the top to make it easier to manage than just with an editor, but in the end just plain text.
If there's something so fundamentally different about running a wiki for yourself on localhost vs a collaboration like Wikipedia or UESP, then why not put some skin into the game and make that point? That sounds like an interesting topic.
I don't even understand the "skepticism". MediaWiki is one of the ubiquitously used platforms in the world via Wikipedia. Nothing about my post hinges on you taking my word, the point was that it will take you a few minutes to get it running yourself, so just try it.
Sure, maybe I came off a little strong by saying that it changed my life. But I have enough life experience to realize when I've encountered something big for me. And being able to organize some of my "lost causes" in a couple days has already made an impact on my daily workflow in a massive way, like for the first time in my life, I feel like I have a grip on my digital existence. I could go into more detail if anyone actually cared the same way I could tell you how moving to Mexico City changed my life after just two days.
Maybe you would walk away from that convo saying that my bar is too low to be using that phrase. Fair enough. But logging into a throwaway to trash it with adolescent glee is a practice in the least charitable interpretation, not someone who wants to have an honest conversation. "Um, there's no way that Mexico City changed your life in just two days" just seems like a nonstarter to me, and rather combative.
If you're skeptical, why not ask how it supposedly changed my life, and we go from there? I glossed over the details of that in my post because, well, that wasn't the point of my post. I just kinda reject this modern attack-dog culture on the internet where you supposedly have to couch everything you say in a front-loaded defense lest someone finds a way to attack you for it instead of probing for more info on it before reaching their conclusion, especially when it's a negative one.
My MediaWiki folder is almost 100gb large and I've been putting a lot of work into regaining control of everything I've built, digitally, in 10 or more years. Yes, it has already changed my life. Though this thread is already far too derailed with walls of text to have that convo here, I think.
Just try it and make your own decision. That was my point from the very first post.
I've thought about knowledge management a lot over the last 20 years, since I built a Wiki/bug tracker system (this was before anything except Bugzilla existed).
I think knowledge management systems can work if the "management" side is a side effect of their use.
But citing wikipedia is often folly. The man hour to output ratio of wikipedia is absolutely enormous. It is an extraordinarily inefficient process that works because there are millions of people moving, structuring, contributing, making templates, rewording, reorganizing, etc. Eventually greatness emerged.
Today though Google Docs, Keep, Notes, Github Gists, github itself, and many other places I can easily store notes and access from anywhere. No reason to setup a wiki and have to maintain it myself.
When you start to plan how to move all of your stuff under one umbrella, the solution starts to sound a lot more like a wiki on paper, I think. Even if you move all this stuff to your filesystem, I think you still need a layer over it to manager it all -- or at least I did.
Of course, it's not the only answer. And I admit I have been contributing to wikis like Wikipedia and UESP for a decade now and the jump to a personal wiki was a no brainer.
But I wonder, what solution would you consider for this "disjointed data" problem? Do you just not see it as a problem? One of the first things I did when I stood up a personal wiki was to log into ancient google accounts to exfiltrate ancient google docs that I'm glad I found again.
My latest experiment (in Mithril/HyperScript/Tachyons/Node.js) integrates a file browser, markdown viewer and editor, and email viewer (although it is all still very rough): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15
But ultimately what we probably need more than tools are simple and popular standards for encoding information that can be linked together. Email (in MIME format) is one such standard but it is fairly complex. Maybe a JSON schema or RDF schema for linked information might help with that. Or something like tags or RDF triples embedded in Markdown -- something I started playing with in Twirlip15 (inspired in part by Foam).
Code for a foam-like "Ideas" app using markdown, triple parsing, and Cytoscape: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a7...
And one example file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c7846...
It just became an append-only log for me with very limited organizational power. Though I do like it for anything just long enough where a single .txt file doesn't cut it. Tiddly is great for that case because it encapsulates the common task of jumping between the same sections over and over -- the real downside of a large file. But you aren't alone in finding it's not so great on a larger scale.
So if you did like the idea of a wiki but weren't diddly with the Tiddly, might be worthwhile to check out something like DokuWiki or MediaWiki.