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I've been writing a personal encyclopedia for the last five or six years or so. I have some 1500+ articles multiple of which are 50+ pages. I think it's been re
by cbau 8y ago
I've been writing a personal encyclopedia for the last five or six years or so. I have some 1500+ articles multiple of which are 50+ pages. I think it's been really valuable. I think I get a few things out of it:
1. Perfect recall. Every little detail I read in a book/blog/article stays with me. Makes it easy to synthesize results from multiple pieces across time, which is useful when you only have a casual interest in something. (I really like downloading the cool education images/GIFs and and inserting them in articles- otherwise I don't know where I'd keep them.)
2. Reveals what I don't know about a subject. For example, whenever I start off writing a new article on some topic, the first thing I write is a definition, e.g. "A cat is an animal that ...". The process of doing that often reveals gaps in my understanding.
3. It makes me better at asking questions when I'm trying to understand something. The analogy I like to make here is that learning a second language is harder than a third language, because after learning the second you know what you need to know to understand a language. But there's no reason that should be limited to languages and couldn't apply to all things, and things themselves. Some questions I like to ask are "What is the function/uses of this thing?" "What are the parts of this thing and how are they arranged?" "How do we make this thing?" "What's the history of this thing?" "What subtypes of this thing are there?"
The downside is that it dramatically slows down my reading speed, since I now feel I need to take detailed notes, and then I often have to reconcile them with notes on other things which can be time-consuming. Considering the number of books a person could realistically read in their lifetime is limited, it's unclear if it's worth the tradeoff.
I'm curious how other people think about remembering things, and if they have a system, what tools they use. It seems unsatisfying to me to read a book and realize I'll probably forget it in four years, yet most people seem content to do so.
If anyone is interested in the specific software I use, here's the Github project: https://github.com/Ceasar/Encyclopedia https://github.com/Ceasar/Encyclopedia. It uses restructuedText (as opposed to Markdown) for the text. I edit them using Vim. All the files are stored in Dropbox so it gets synced between my devices. A simple Flask web server renders the pages in a prettier format.
Still very primitive compared to what it could potentially be, but combined with regular Unix command line tools it's worked fine for my needs. (I like the idea of a hacker-wiki by the way, more than something like this which comes out of the box. Seems like an personal wiki designed for a power user could be way more interesting.)
- capnrefsmmat 8y agoI have the same fear of forgetting things and the desire to remember everything I've learned. I'm an academic, so mostly this means references to papers and books I've read, along with notes summarizing their contents. (My PhD advisor used to say that a sign of learning isn't whether you remember something -- it's how quickly you can re-learn it. So I try to make it easy to find and re-learn things I need.) Since I need to cite papers, I had to put together a system that can read BibTeX bibliographies and format them into references. I cobbled together a Hakyll config that uses Pandoc and KaTeX to turn Org files into HTML pages, with a simple chronological listing: https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/ https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/ I've found this useful for my own reference and to share with others -- if someone asks me about some topic I've read about, I can just send the notebook link with summary and citations. I'd like a version that doesn't need separate BibTeX files (though that should be easy to solve with a couple scripts or some Emacs packages), and perhaps intelligent full-text search, but for the moment I like that it produces static HTML that will last forever.
- Kagerjay 8y agoPrivate encyclopedias just don't work for me. Neither does keeping large amounts of well formatted documents privately. I can't hold myself accountable unless its public, and easily accessible with a search engine. Notes are primarily to break down topics and cement my understanding of it Maybe this is just me but its pretty convenient to just type "name-of-article-you-made or name-of-video-you-made" on google and then get the files you've made. Tiddlywiki's maintenance cost and learning curve / ability to create notes efficiently and effortlessly is not there to me. I've tried picking it up a dozen times in the last few year. A good notetaking app should get out of your way entirely, and only add a small cost of maintenance for the larger amounts of benefits you reap from it. Everything needs to be visible at a glance, with nothing hiding behind obscurity Something like book reviews, you can write a review on goodreads to remember your opinions and thoughts were. You can bookmark things and use readwise to autosync and send you email reminders of things highlighted / quotes
- comboy 8y ago> I have some 1500+ articles multiple of which are 50+ pages Holy shit. Make it public. The idea is fantastic. I would love to have something like wikipedia but people have separate pages on topic. Or, in other words, if you want to find everything written by given person, why not that easy it is doable - it was more doable back when blogs were more popular. But if you want to find everything on given topic written by different people that's not such an easy task. I feel like it should be solved soon by machine learning and evolution of search engines, but you still have the problem of which authors (or inevitably bots) do you actually want to see. This can be solved with a global web of trust.