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Comment by kajaktum | Hacker News Reader

I feel like wikis can be made so much simpler by using Git + Markdown + Hugo (or whatever it is).

Wikis may have become complex beasts, but in the original 1995 design they were pretty much just finding CamelCasedWords and turning them into hyperlinks; minimal wikis could be a dozen lines of code...

I wish Obsidian used git instead of its own sync protocol and service. I've used it, and it wasn't bad, but I didn't feel comfortable using a third party proprietary and undocumented protocol for notes that I felt were important.

I thought it'd be okay to use the community-maintained Obsidian git plugin, but as fate would have it, my original fears actually came to pass. I lost over a month of notes due to how badly behaved its git merge heuristics are. It force pushes and rewrites history and will step on other machines with different updates. It took me a little while to catch on to the fact my notes were disappearing, and there was nothing I could do to recover.

I ultimately threw up my hands and abandoned Obsidian outright.

I just use Google drive to sync across devices, which also keeps a file history of all changes over the last 30 days (up to 100 versions per file).

I've hit that "git plugin is crap" problem with obsidian too. You've just made me think I should try unison. Also been thinking about a SSG backed with obsidian, sooooo...

Or just use MediaWiki

It's its own beast to maintain. A lot is hiding behind your "just".

If the use case is single user wiki and the user is technical enough, MediaWiki requires more resources and is also more work than Git + Markdown + a static site generator if you are already comfortable with static site generators. No specific web server config, no tricky configuration files, no database to maintain, not difficulties to upgrade the server…

Now, one could argue that "single user wiki" just means "regular website" because the essence of the wiki is gone. Wiki means "quick" (friction-less?) edits by multiple users, possibly anonymous [1]). What the author of the post did is convenient handling of internal links. Which is still a good idea, but I would do it differently: I would not create a <a href="..."> tag for missing pages, that not very nice to users. If you do this, you are intentionally creating broken links that can only be distinguished with styling, which is not very accessible. Red links are useful in an actual wiki where users can actually create the page, but on a regular website, I'd use something like <span class="missing" title="Dedicated page coming"> or so (+ whatever is needed for the title text to be accessible).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

> A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication, collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser

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