Wikis
- [[pull]] [[wiki]]
- [[pull]] [[wiki engines]]
- a [[list]]
https://twitter.com/sschuldenzucker/status/1375758622932754434
Wikis
What is a wiki?
Quite an amorphous term these days.
soft security, editability of both content + metadata, recent changes, permalinks, editable namespaces. A healthy dose of eventualism
– SJ, Agora Discuss
Wiki is perhaps the only web idiom that is not a child of BBS culture. It derives historically from pre-web models of hypertext, with an emphasis on the pre. The immediate ancestor of wiki was a [[HyperCard]] stack maintained by Ward Cunningham that attempted to capture community knowledge among programmers. Its philosophical godfather was the dead-tree hypertext A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s.
Wiki iterates not through the creation of new posts, but through the refactoring of old posts. It shows not a mind in motion, but the clearest and fairest description of what that mind has (or more usually, what those minds have) arrived at. I t values reuse over reply, and links are not pointers to related conversations but to related ideas.
Is a personal wiki an oxymoron?
What wiki brought to these models, which were personal to start with, was collaboration. Wiki values are often polar opposites of blogging values. Personal voice is meant to be minimized. Voices are meant to be merged.
Not so true for the personal wiki. Maybe a personal wiki is wiki software but with different values for the output?
Rather than serial presentation, wiki values treating pages as nodes that stand outside of any particular narrative, and attempt to be timeless rather than timebound reactions.
This is still true for personal wikis.
Has this to say about WikiJS:
Can be linked to a Git repo and do round trip, but the database is the main DB, with sync to/from Git being done at intervals via single committer ID. That said, it is “Docker ready” using NodeJS and is actively maintained.
Which is not quite true. The DB is essentially a cache. The single committer is true.
My notes:
- [[Gollum]] -- not really setup for differential access without runing a whole SSO server
- [[Realms]] -- domain is dead, last code update 2018
- [[DokuWiki]] -- git backed plugin is 5 years last update https://github.com/woolfg/dokuwiki-plugin-gitbacked, still might be worth trying
- [[Jingo]] -- https://github.com/claudioc/jingo -- worth checking, although very basic auth
Wiki
- a [[thing]].
-
A [[technology]].
- [[digital]] [[social]]
- discovered by [[ward cunningham]].
-
the [[agora]] tries to be a kind of best-effort integrated [[wiki]].
- in my mind it leads to a [[democratic]] [[distributed knowledge graph]].
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive: John Carmack's journal plans. Interesting to follow the practices of someone productive and their organizational strategy. Self-tracking in Plain Text · Jethro Kuan https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125 https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#why: Building a search engine for personal knowledge. also see https://www.gwern.net/Search#search Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead
How do others do it?
In Defense of Inclusionism · Gwern.net: Why wikipedia is in decline and what might be done to recover.
My Writing Setup with Emacs. The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Fort… Ask HN: How do you learn complex, dense technical information? | Hacker News A Meta-Layer for Notes « julian.digital: What can we do with sticky notes around your computer? Self-Directed Learning (SDL) Ask HN: What is your learning strategy? | Hacker News My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
blogging for free
pluma free blog focused writing place convenient, fast web pages express yourself quickly raw expression the cask https://txt.fyi/+/57688c94 anon we comments on any site reading and text editor focused writing. tilde. in gopher. collective. an excellent client for playing go
Search
Motivation
Organization
I needed a way to better organize my ideas. Administering structure to my data was a good way to do this, and org-mode provides a good facility for this. Organize my notes better, as they're visible to the public.
Accessibility
I'd like my notes to be easily visible to anyone. It allows me to easily share my thoughts and perspectives with friends or colleagues.
Publicity
This portal also enables recruiters or future collaborators to learn more about me, my skills and my interests. Perhaps I can build a following, inspire someone, or find an interesting job opportunity if someone stumbles upon this wiki.
Ideas
- tag hypothes.is notations with names of pages; show each one in a separate window when displaying the page.
- do the same for are.na channels; can display related blocks of a particular channel on the page next to some writing.
- Bret Victor's website (https://worrydream.com) employs a dynamic home page that has individual articles float in windows on a film reel, but these articles can also be focused on and viewed full-page. The Tufte influences on the graphs and navigation are evident, and the full page view is so much more easily interactive and less distracting that it's worth considering doing something similar for my site.
- https://metacademy.org/
- https://years.cblgh.org/ Briefly summarize what you've done each month and year! This is excellent for reflection, learning and growth. It can be easily contrasted with goals. I think that doing this on a monthly basis would be much more helpful than yearly; perhaps I could introduce some tags to the wiki that would help catalogue this.
- https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/remembrance_agents/: How do we remember - and continue to remember - these ideas for life?
- https://github.com/controversial/wikipedia-map
- https://www.brendanschlagel.com/2017/11/05/canonize-creating-personal-canon-template/ :: Add a personal canon; catalogue the things that have had the most impact on you. This could be difficult but it's worth goingthrough the effort! Would be great to do some justice to each thing that's inspired you.
- https://phse.net/values/ :: Cataloguing a list of values on the website seems incredibly value for myself or for others. These ideas are definitely admirable. (Making connections with other people has a higher return than making good work, it seems!)
Tools for Better Thinking
thread The most underrated problem solving tool is to type out and explain your thought process. Start writing down questions to ask others; as you explain what you have tried, you will begin to realize that there are more things left to try – some of which being potential solutions.
Type your question into StackOverflow to submit; you'll be fearful of asking the question.
Rank factors; always express factors as positive attributes. After generating the table, the longest continuous line of check marks for each factor determines the choice (though this can be gamed…) State charts: easy to reason about state changes without the explosion of state machines. These are hierarchical state machines, in a sense. The Inversion Methods: The solution to many hard problems can be clarified by re-expressing them in inverse form. Crossline: structure your thoughts as you type and make cross-references.
mental models for making intelligent decisions tools for systems thinkers state machines for complex systmes enabling inventive problem solving analyzing and forecasting tool tools for better thinking .
Design
tags
Web
Design,Design
The design of this wiki has gone through multiple phases.
I started with a Hugo template, adding browsing features in multiple panes to the site, but Hugo proved to be too complex of a tool to sustainably use in the long term.
The current iteration of this site is generated with a Pandoc-based tool I've written myself, as I felt I wanted more customizability. Eventually, I'd like to generate multiple front-ends for the website – so that visitors can view it as a wiki, as a traditional blog, a series of journals, or something in between – depending on how they view the website.
References
I've taken inspiration from several others who maintain wikis.
- Tommy Morriss first introduced me to the idea with his personal (private) wiki.
- Jethro has easily accessible articles and templates that I've made use of to put this together.
- 100 Rabbits publish all of their notes and information in a custom wiki framework. Logseq is a really cool tool for maintaining a personal knowledge basin that syncs effortlessly with GitHub. https://github.com/kormyen/memex
Further Inspiration
- https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNotes=zUw5PuD8op9oq8kHvni6sug6eRTNtR9Wqma
- https://royniang.com/ has an excellent wiki with a ton of great ideas. Good style! Worth linking Personal Websites.
- Stanford's psychology wiki is detailed and easy to navigate.
- Frank McSherry's blog is maintained entirely by .md files in a journal with a simple markdown index. Git is the UI. https://twtxt.net/ is an interesting microblogging platform
- https://codeberg.org/Valenoern/bopwiki :: a small wiki implemented entirely in a DSL that's been written in common lisp!
- https://blot.im/ :: blog with your favorite text editor, publish to the service. Basically a static site generator?
- https://azlen.me/ is an excellent second brain. They're an admirable writer with loads worth following.
https://github.com/jackmcdade/secret-public-journal https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base elisp wiki https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p https://github.com/bennetthardwick/website https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge – i love the idea of visualizing the ralations of the notes as well as his rationale https://github.com/aceyoung9/garden https://github.com/binyamin/eleventy-garden
Notes
https://jlelse.blog/posts/wiki-approach/ cool wiki approach :: find the best method for me ! I think writing a blog post is the best way to help me organize my thoughts, i should get that infrastructure up. nextcloud notes is also a good option, but i do have to set up a nextcloud server to handle that https://dpitt.me/blog/2020/03/zettelkasten/ obsidian md knowledge base The Brain is a digital memory solution written and maintained by the brother of Acronym's founder, Errolson,for many years. It's not well known in the technology space, but it's popular with creatives and researchers who often don't intersect with the field.
organization
https://todaytakeseverything.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-bullet-journal-bulletproof/ doing things once a day and putting them in a bullet journal or something working with the garage door up :: why we should learn with wikis in the open.
- site map!
- related tags!
- backlinks!
- resoures!
- activity graph for research or projects! i love how this wiki looks and feels uses PARA method of organizing information and a feed! god this shit is so good and a table of contents but everything is hidden out of the way! IBM plex mono is almost there - but not quite
hypothesis: a margin with conversations anywhere on the web! i cannot stress how cool this is, particularly the trick with the sidebar https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ http://mindforger.com/: markdown-powered wiki software
concrete plan
learn to build small software! a wiki is the best way to do this.
- write a basic org-mode parser in ANSI C and C++ supports links, `#+title`, nested bullets, etc. fairly simple to start.
- with inspiration from devine's wiki, integrate this parser into a service that parses things out to html, also written in ANSI C
- continue to rewrite in rust and other languages, like zig perhaps, for fun and to learn more programming
-
experiment with a file format other than org under the hood; something
with an equivalent level of expression but much simpler [i don't use
most of the features of org here anyways; org feels like it's doing
too much as a file format, and i use different subsets of the format
in different ways]
- would be cool to use a babel-adjacent technology to be able to convert to file formats compatible with other platforms on the fly.
experiments
- figure out the best way to do project management. learn more about the mailing list strategy adn see how that compares to a `TODO.org` approach that I've been using in a few of my projects to take notes and ideas.
- build hyper specific tools to interact with my wiki in different ways to enforce certain ways of integrating with it: adding a new idea, journal entry, or something similar for example. emacs is a nice interface and should be worked on, but it shouldn't be the only one. small, portable `.sh` scripts could be fun to experiment with here.
ideas
List of artists and hackers using homegrown time-tracking tools https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden https://github.com/drichard/mindmaps https://joplinapp.org/ open source note taking and todo app local first self-hosted wiki tool (dendron) knowledge base from nikita second brain digital gardeners https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/exobrain https://github.com/jsjoeio/joeprevite.com notes for people we keep in touch with open source wiki Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead Kate on Twitter: "Making regexp -> NFA compilation faster by constructin https://github.com/schollz/cowyo neat, encrypted wiki! Code Samples - Impredicative Wiki Wiki bphenriques/knowledge-base: Personal Wiki Introduction - Everything I know This FTP site knowledge/wiki-workflow.md at master · nikitavoloboev/knowledge Building a digital garden Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create. Marcin Ignac on Twitter: "I'm fascinated by @andymatuschak digital garden https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html https://billdemirkapi.me/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring a webring for static site generators, allows for generating a webring from a list of RSS feeds to join the sites together kormyen/memex https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ http://okmij.org/ftp/ Memex 1.1 | John Naughton's online diary https://mboxed.github.io/sodatsu/#home A gardening guide for your mind • Mental Nodes Collected Notes. https://bismuth.garden/now anotherPersonal Websites and wiki https://libarynth.org/start https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#table-of-contents very cool, simple wiki with an indexable menu https://marcus-obst.de/wiki/Notetaking opinionated wiki advice https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108466 iterative approach to notes
some new wiki ideas from issues
- 'see the diff for this section': click the button to see the page diff visualized over time. inspired by this: https://mbuffett.com/posts/bevy-snake-tutorial/
- show 'last modified'
- estimate reading time
- add link to newsletter signup
-
display stats on the main page:
- number of words
- number of pages
- number of links between pages
- extract tags from each file and display things in sub-pages throughout the wiki according to tags. this needs some exploration, and could be interfaced with in addition to backlinks. this needs some investigation - how can i fuse with other distributed wiki ideas?
- (only with rust rewrite): support evaluation of code blocks during generation. integrate with nix to install and use the right programs to run
- (rust) export to gemini system, host on gemini server
- ways to visualize history throughout the file to show what's changed over time! perhaps a 'changed recently' as well
goula.sh
https://goula.sh/ some excellent ideas
- millions of tags!
- lots of side notesz
- feature highlights throughout the notes, interweaving them with the writing can i write public texts on the web?
- uses links as nodes, cataloguing references to them throughout the writing. i can't read too much into this though - or i will begin to lose creativity!
- tracking aesthetics on one wiki page: https://thomasorus.com/aesthetics.html
- love the time graph here! maybe I should spend more time tracking. i want a solution that does this in the background, though, to a degree…
- https://arcana.computer/catalogs/media-diet: track a more consistent media diet. perhaps this is possible with my review system in conjunction with git (and emails i have sent myself) ?
Making a Wiki: Ideas
Status Quo
Wikipedia
Pros:
- Single source of truth: it's a trustworthy source. People know to get their data from here.
- Tons of information. Crowdsourcing has done the
Cons:
- Because it's a single source of truth, there are constant fights over what belongs where that are often fruitless.
- There are also strong arguments that are made for information being 'out of scope' for wikipedia and belonging to a page or site that is more domain specific.
- The organization is bloated and inneficient. They really don't need your donations.
- The servers are centralized and controlled by a single private entity with the potenial to hold data (partially - sans clever parsers) captive.
Wikia
Pros:
- Tons of information with moderators who are experts on their domains.
- Dedicated contributors, existing communities, easy to edit.
Cons:
- Divided into lots of different wikis with no interoperability between them.
- Tons of overlap between wikis (i.e. multiple star wars and minecraft ones, among other franchises and tropes)
- Typically used for casual and hobby interests rather than professional writing and work - why?
Personal wiki implementation
Pros:
- Super flexible.
Cons:
- Not a consistent or reliable source of information, as it's typically controlled by one person.
- Can be disorganized and things can easily become unmaintained.
Goals
- Decentralized: share information from many sources without being controlled by any of them
- Open: should incorporate as many sources of knowledge as possible, and individual wikis should have tons of agency.
- Easy to use: it should be incredibly easy to contribute to and communicate with some sort of central wiki.
Information Sources
In order of priority:
- Wikia sites (there are tons!)
- Wikipedia
- wiki.c2.org
- Assorted third party wikis.
- [perhaps] personal wikis
- etc…
Fusing all of the Wikia sites into a single, cohesive wiki seems incredibly useful.
Feature Ideas
- shared & enhanced pages: fuse pages that cover similar or related topics together into one view.
- consensus: condense and share overlapping information, reducing the amount of duplication.
- interoperable: shift from one wiki to another easily.
Wiki IR related decentralized wiki idea (what we were talking about in chat, but not really what is above)
- uses wiki IR standard to link together many peoples personal wikis
-
there is an engine at the center (or several?) that crawl the
wikiverse and attempt to bring together pages that are similar
-
when pages are similar (by AI?, NLP measure), suggest several types
of merging
-
suggestion ways
- as part of wiki IR cli tool display suggestions
- make tiny website dashbaord backed by small webapp that phones to recomender engine
-
types of page merging (between peoples federated wiki)
- link at the bottom of page to other pages with similar content (like webring)
- transclude entire other page to bottom of your page (and vice versa, both pages in the link transclude eachother)
-
suggest that pages are merged using git-esque strategy (pull
request, text diff/merge tools like mergely)
- q: where does consenus page live? on neither page? (next to ai engines) on one page? (one of the merge requesters 'wins', one conceceds), or both (they share :))
-
goals of merging
- reduce information duplication
- instead of conflicts of information being resolved in backchannel of wikipedia, consensus arguments are disputed publicly through pull requests and accepted/rejected page links
- epic and cool
-
suggestion ways
-
when pages are similar (by AI?, NLP measure), suggest several types
of merging
Conversation linking
- make conversations first class primitive of wiki, so that concepts are linked to discussion in which they are conceived
- can be as simple as citations linking to specific conversations
- uses matrix? hard part is technical challenge of implementation
Backlink fixing
- move/rename pages and update backlinks
Automatically backup videos/external sites
- https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
- like gwern, to prevent linkrot
Provide tools to make good public/private separation
- so that people can have shareable personal wiki concepts/reference pages, while also having extremely messy private brainstorming (brainstorming=unformed,errorfull,shameless,indulgently bad, creative, risky)/exobrain wiki pages.
Syntax that is not static/markup
-
I want a markup syntax like (move [otherpage]: " this concept
deserves to be in other page, but right now i am in [firstpage] and
don't want to move all the way to otherpage in emacs so im gonna write
this thought in a move block: this thought")
- and that will append that thought to the bottom of other page once i save or run tool or something (linter?)
New types of syntax
-
some syntax for assigning how sure you are of an idea, or how much you
like it
- font size???!
- number of exclamation points vs question marks !!!
First class support for sorting lists
- idk how this would work but interactive sorting is underrated!!!
WIKI LSP
- breadcrumbs (https://i.stack.imgur.com/wu4kP.png)
- definition/lookup. like you can name concepts and hover for definitions?
- autocompletion of other page names
TODO accessible web
menu or dictionary to help people understand definitions in a comprehensible but noninvasive way
Wiki is an editable website, usually public. Related: [[digital garden]], something like a private wiki.
По-русски: [[вики]].
A wiki needs a [[wiki engine]] to work. Some people say wikis are dying, see [[wiki necrolog]].
Wikis are important, a lot of stuff I do is wiki-related.
= What is a wiki There is no consensus, actually. People call everything a wiki nowadays. => https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108562886666549582 | Had some discussion on the question recently. It's one of the many.
= Links => http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/08.html#a1233 [[bookmark]]
=> http://thoughtstorms.info/view/OnWiki => http://thoughtstorms.info/view/WikiSyntaxIsTheUserInterface
=> https://miraheze.org/ | Miraheze
В июле 2015 Джон Льюис и Ферран Тьюфан создали новую вики-ферму — Miraheze. При помощи краудфандинга и персональных инвестиций Miraheze официально был запущен в августе 2015. За несколько лет проект сильно вырос, чтобы стать одной из крупнейших и самых узнаваемых вики-ферм, предлагающих MediaWiki. Несмотря на успех и эволюцию, один аспект Miraheze не изменился — формальное существование. В ноябре 2019 Miraheze был зарегистрирован в Великобритании в качестве некоммерческой организации как Miraheze Limited.
=> https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2021-07-13_The_wiki_aesthetic | Alex Schroeder: 2021-07-13 The wiki aesthetic
I like wikis. I develop and maintain wiki engines (the software), and I run wikis (various sites, including this one). Whenever I dabble in new protocols like Gopher, Gemini, or Spartan, and whenever start using a particular markup language some more, I think about how one would integrate all this into a wiki.
=> https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2020-06-15_Why_Wiki%E2%80%BD | Alex Schroeder: 2020-06-15 Why Wiki‽
The effort required to maintain a wiki is worth it, to me, because we have a viable alternative to the isolation of self-hosting, and the surrender to value-extracting corporations. Doing things together, achieving things together, is important to teach the new generation of people coming online, it is important to teach ourselves that resistance is not futile, resistance is not a struggle, resistance to the machine is the simple act of having fun and building things together.
=> https://felix.plesoianu.ro/blog/where-to-wiki.html | Felix Rambles: Where to, wiki?
Wait, I know: it's simply too easy for me to open a text file and add a couple of lines. So easy in fact, I have little reason to bother with a wiki. No wonder many developers use one big Org Mode file for the purpose. As for the less technical of us, they'll want rich text, and I can't even blame them.
But plain text files can't bring together communities. No, not even if you put them up on a software forge. Also, they're kind of banal. That's a good thing usually. Except sometimes you want them cool. And Org Mode is much too linear.
A wiki solves all these problems and more. It would be nice if I could recapture that spirit. Timely, too: over on the Community Wiki, they seem to think the medium is due for a revival, if it hasn't started already.
=> https://observable.wiki.dbbs.co/view/observable-and-federated-wiki | Observable and Federated Wiki
Observable is an approachable programming environment for data visualization, or really, almost anything you can imagine in Javascript. With the frame plugin, a wiki page is also a programming environment. Here we share one example integrating the two. We hope to encourage other examples.
=> http://this.how/littleoutliner/ | What is Little Outliner?
Little Outliner is an easy to learn, entry-level outliner that runs in a web browser.
It's written in JavaScript. You must have JS turned on in the browser to be able to use it.
=> http://sdi.thoughtstorms.info/?p=1450 | The Lower-Case Mistake
The mistake is that wiki page names are obviously CamelCased for readability. A convention I like very much and continue to use. But I decided to make the file-names all lower-case. In other words, I throw away the capitalization of the name.
=> https://www.liberafolio.org/2021/05/25/vikipedio-atingos-novan-rekordon-cu-gravas/ | Vikipedio atingos novan rekordon – ĉu gravas?
Tre baldaŭ la Esperanta Vikipedio atingos novan rekordon: 300 000 artikoloj. Sed ĉu plej gravas la kvanto aŭ la kvalito de la artikoloj, kaj ĉu ekzistas rilato inter tiuj du? Sojle al la nova atingo Libera Folio intervjuis Michal Matúšov, unu el la ĉefaj aktivuloj de la Esperanta Vikipedio.
=> http://thoughtstorms.info/view/ForgettingInThoughtStorms Автора смущает, что у него больше старого контента, чем нового.
I don't want to throw the old ones away wholesale. It's not that they aren't interesting, or sometimes very informative. But somehow the weighting is wrong. We need ways for older ideas to naturally recede and not be "deleted" but gradually overwritten / swamped by the newer stuff.
=> https://github.com/NerdyPepper/taizen curses+cursed based mediawiki browser.
=> https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Organization_of_information/How_I_use_personal_wiki.html
=> https://kidneybone.com/ A mirror to Ward's wiki
Wiki Engines
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://doc.anagora.org/css/center.css"> <button class="pull-url" value="https://doc.anagora.org/css/center.css">">pull</button>
<div class="container-fluid text-center">
<div class="vertical-center-row">
<h1>500 Internal Error <small>wtf.</small></h1>
</div>
</div>
- public document at doc.anagora.org/wikis
- video call at meet.jit.si/wikis