A suggest addition "time-based partitioning" or when your notes have a time-based taxonomy like:
- archive/ for notes spanning an indefinite amount of time, as long as they exists
- YYYY/ an year by another
- YYYY/mm/dd notes etc
Might seems strange at first but one of the problems of wikis and notes is outdated/garbage content. Keep notes/wikis clean it's essentially an impossible task because it's alone a full time job. Using time-based subdivision allow to have noise/garbage without polluting much the "normally used wiki/notes space" still retain bits that might became useful in the future.
Aside almost all wikis/notes tools fails miserably in attachment management. The real point of notes is being themselves an "information system", much like a file system not constrained by files and directories. Managing files it's essential to complete the game and merely "you can attach a file" does not suffice.
Dynamically composed pages (transclusion, pages formed out of queries) are a must. The original idea was probably the Libraries of Babel, by Conrad Gessner [1] with hist idea of "information cut to atoms (books cut with scissors) reassembled on the fly by the human" because when we need some bits we just want them and a whole book [or file, or page] it's simply too much noise to deal with for some bits of signal. Far more modern Mundaneum [2] was essentially a pre-web web. XML-based feeds in modern time are another. The issue is having a proper UI.
So far some have arrived nearby: org-mode allow some aspects, TiddlyWiki some others (good transclusion), BookStack some others as well but ultimately all fails the complete picture IMVHO because most of them are designed by devs without library knowledge experience and librarian have next-to-zero needed IT knowledge to offer the other bits needed to know to create a complete system.
Good food for thought and hopefully an inspiration for people to build on.
The wiki movement has stagnated for a long time. Some reasons are internal e.g., overpromising on semantic technologies and never really delivering a step change in functionality that will delight people the way the original wikis did.
But most of the reasons for the wiki no-show are external, driven by the dominant economics of the modern digital experience which despite the optimistic early book with the same title, is not Wikinomics.
Yet the cognitive stress from information overload is not getting less. If we ever manage to get away from the user-as-product paradigm the design and function of wikis will be a key ingredient for the next digital revolution.
To me, i think the big axis that is missing here is to what extent there is structure.
Some wikis are just a collection of pages, maybe cross linked. Other wikis allow the user to create complex workflows and are structured around this (in mediawiki land this would be things like SemanticMediaWiki or cargo).
Essentially, are you making a collaborative web version of notepad or excel?
I now realize that I think of a 'wiki' as being *collaborative* specifically in ways where contributions are solicited rather than say, a knowledge base or some other linked-or-related-note system as described here. I do not think of my Obsidian or Notion instances as "wikis" though I do have public sets of notes in some instances. I can "add someone" to it to collaborate but there is no way for a general reader to submit proposals to add or change information. Is there another term that specifically makes that distinction?
> I do not think of my Obsidian or Notion instances as "wikis"
Because they're not.
There's a weird thing that happened with the word "wiki" where wikis appeared, and then a project came along with the purpose of using a wiki build an encyclopedia, and then people who were confused about which aspect exactly is what made it a wiki vs what it was about it that made it an encyclopedia decided to start going around referring to all sorts of things that couldn't remotely be described as a wiki (but could loosely be described as an "encyclopedia of <X>") as a wiki, anyway.
Previously:
> These people are not building a personal wiki—they're building a personal _encyclopedia_. That's what they're doing. An "encyclopedia of me"[...] It's like if you lived your whole life in a part of the world where iced coffee isn't consumed (and other types of coffee only rarely), then when it's introduced to your people it's to great fanfare, and for no good reason a subset of your countrymen start calling all sorts of unrelated things "ice", whether ice is involved or not. Their sole motivation? The thing they're referring to is a coffee product.
Once upon a time a team I was on used Lotus Notes to document and coordinate the design of our project. What I liked was that we had a hierarchy of folders with documents and anytime someone updated a document it would appear in bold (and its folder and its folder's folder etc). This meant, it was easy to see at a glance, what had been updated.
Since that time, teams have used wikis and or other systems. None of them provide that feature of highlighting what's been updated.
- archive/ for notes spanning an indefinite amount of time, as long as they exists
- YYYY/ an year by another
- YYYY/mm/dd notes etc
Might seems strange at first but one of the problems of wikis and notes is outdated/garbage content. Keep notes/wikis clean it's essentially an impossible task because it's alone a full time job. Using time-based subdivision allow to have noise/garbage without polluting much the "normally used wiki/notes space" still retain bits that might became useful in the future.
Aside almost all wikis/notes tools fails miserably in attachment management. The real point of notes is being themselves an "information system", much like a file system not constrained by files and directories. Managing files it's essential to complete the game and merely "you can attach a file" does not suffice.
Dynamically composed pages (transclusion, pages formed out of queries) are a must. The original idea was probably the Libraries of Babel, by Conrad Gessner [1] with hist idea of "information cut to atoms (books cut with scissors) reassembled on the fly by the human" because when we need some bits we just want them and a whole book [or file, or page] it's simply too much noise to deal with for some bits of signal. Far more modern Mundaneum [2] was essentially a pre-web web. XML-based feeds in modern time are another. The issue is having a proper UI.
So far some have arrived nearby: org-mode allow some aspects, TiddlyWiki some others (good transclusion), BookStack some others as well but ultimately all fails the complete picture IMVHO because most of them are designed by devs without library knowledge experience and librarian have next-to-zero needed IT knowledge to offer the other bits needed to know to create a complete system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_library circa 1545
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum first half of '900