Ask HN: What Is a “Wiki”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Is a “Wiki”?

17 pointspnorvx5 comments

I mean personal wiki when I say "wiki". Wikipedia has an article about it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_wiki

The Wikipedia article shows that a wiki that allows one to organize information similar to collaborative wikis except that a personal wiki is not collaborative.

I have been investigating the blogging, wiki, digital garden culture in the last few days to see what people who host their own websites do to organize their personal information.

I found some very good examples of digital gardens in this awesome Twitter thread - https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880

The first example in that Twitter thread is this wiki/garden - https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/ - Garden, yes. But is this really a wiki? Can a simple tree of files be called a wiki?

I am trying to understand what is or isn't wiki. This might help me decide how I should name and organise my digital garden.

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I use wikis to manage my knowledge. It has many parts with links, backlinks, and references. I write down my project plans, notes from books that I read, knowledge about ongoing projects, todos.

It has a homepage, several sections, pages, and folders.

It is not much of an upkeep as you might think. My wiki grows organically.

When there is an ongoing event, it gets it own page and the title finds its place on the Homepage.

I use my wiki as a "second brain". It contains all sorts of non-private, personal information.

It has had many benefits in my life- some of them measurable. I still am an avid wiki maintainer and plan to remain so.

I first tried Zettelkasten. But it did not stick. My notes were too long.

My wikis are maintained in Obsidian and three-way synced with a cloud server and my laptop.

Will highly recommend.

I read about Zettelkasten, read a few pages of Getting Things Done by David Allen, and the book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt. There was a chapter on wikis.

Right now, I do reviews manually. But I intend to make it automatic by implementing Spaced Repeatation.

Right now, I am looking into that.

This is a very interesting question that has also bothered me for quite long.

The term was used by Ward Cunningham to name first wiki because of the distinct feature that allowed users to perform quick edits. He borrowed the term wiki from a quick airport shuttle bus in Hawaii. I think wikiwiki means quick in Hawaiian.

After trying many options throughout the years to host my own personal wiki, I have settled down on plain text files written in org, that satisfy certain conventions. For a personal wiki, quick edits are a bit pointless since there's just one user. If you go for plain text files, everything is easy to edit and you can get many other perks like version control.

Most relevant ideas for a personal wiki can be borrowed from Zettelkasten, which is exactly that. A personal knowledge base.

It sounds like you might not be familiar with C2, which (still) hosts the original Wiki site at http://wiki.c2.com/. The basic concept -- a community-editable site with editing tools designed to ease the process of intra-site links -- has been generalized, but really not changed much.

Wikis are collections of flat text files (with varying levels of markup rendering, but always supporting links to other files) on a platform that by default allows any file to be edited by any authorized user of the platform (n = 1 for personal wikis)

To mi Wiki is a platform that allows collaboration and editing of content.

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