7 ms·

> I just got into it two days ago This is the rub. I started a tiddlywiki last year, and stuck with it for several months, but now it has fallen to the wayside

> I just got into it two days ago This is the rub. I started a tiddlywiki last year, and stuck with it for several months, but now it has fallen to the wayside as too cumbersome.

hn_check 6y ago
This is the problem with a good percentage of advice and life/career hacks on HN -- they're always spoken of in the early, idealist stage. Before the reality has set in. Before the downsides have made their presence known. I've been in a number of firms with wiki knowledge systems. In 100% of the cases it was a wasteland of derelict knowledge that had been abandoned and was usually much more destructive than beneficial. No one was going to undertake the process of keeping it up to date, and at the same time the emergent organization/structure of information was constantly evolving, and wikis are terrible at evolving with that unless you literally have people whose sole job is making templates deciding on the ontology, etc. Similarly, countless people have tried to organize their lives into tools like wiki. And in the early days it seems magical. I suspect the failure rate would be somewhere barely under 100% at the one month mark.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I don't really understand your take-away except for a cynical "bah, nothing ever works so don't try." Or maybe it annoys you that you didn't see some trite platitudinal disclaimer in my post about how how life is all about trade-offs and what works for Bob might work for Alice. It's like you're about to tell me that exercising doesn't pay off because it's hard to stick with a strategy. "Heh, let's see if he's still doing pushups in a year." You don't seem to realize you're just describing literally all systems. How organized is everyone's filesystem and ~/Documents folder? It's pure chaos with the only sweet release being that you might not carry it over when you upgrade computers and get to start from scratch. Will I be maintaining my localhost wiki in a year? I don't know. But it's worth a shot. After two days it's already 1000x organized than even my best efforts so far. Is it for everyone? Nothing is for everyone. But your comment seems to suggest that you think the alternative to <organization strategy> is organized data which obviously isn't the case. What you will realize is that there is no perfect one-size-fits-all strategy. All you can do is try things and see if they work for you, and see if you stick with them years later. So, for today, I recommend trying some localhost wiki options in your battle against chaos. If it doesn't work for you, so what?
  - hn_check 6y ago
    >"I don't really understand your take-away except for a cynical "bah, nothing ever works so don't try." Or maybe it annoys you that you didn't see some trite platitudinal disclaimer in my post about how how life is all about trade-offs and what works for Bob might work for Alice." The take away is clearly "things that work in the small often don't work in the large. If you're taking life advice, take it from someone who has done something for a while and had a reasonable experience.". Someone crowing about their two day experience is...well... This applies to all sorts of similar enthusiastic advice. Intermittent napping. Standing desks. The Dvorak keyboard. Drinking your coffee with butter. New diets. Going without the internet. Meditating. Taking up karate. Working in parks. Whatever. There's a lot of wisdom and knowledge among them, but it isn't coming from the guy who just started. If someone is giving a sales pitch for a lifestyle change based upon a tiny experience, they are often doing it because they think converting others makes it more real/more likely to yield the change they want. It doesn't work that way. Try things. Try lots of things. Save evangelizing until you maybe have a real experience?
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Ah, so worthless cynicism and condescension after all. I see why you made a novelty account for this. But I wonder if you see the irony in promoting yourself into this role of inquisitor? I get it, you're mad that I admitted I only have two days of experience while telling people how to get started in one of the most important software platforms in the world (it's how Wikipedia works) -- I'm not exactly making new sounds on this. Maybe you're fine with my install instructions, but I went too far (for your tastes) when I said it was promising so far. And you thought this behavior needed to be called out by your "Dunning-Kruger in the wild" meme account. I don't think I've misinterpreted the situation, I just find it a bit sad and I wonder how much you think you've added to the discussion. That you run that account, you must think: "quite a bit!" I'll leave that one up to the audience.
      - hn_check 6y ago
        >"Ah, so worthless cynicism and condescension after all. I see why you made a novelty account for this. But I wonder if you see the irony in playing this sort of inquisitor?" You are irrationally hostile. My comments are not for your edification or service, and this is a shared platform where multiple people are reading and deriving value, each comment kicking off different thoughts and conversations. If you take this so incredibly personally, that's a you problem. Your internalization and repeated attacks are bizarre. But you do you.
- nl 6y ago
  I agree with this for the most part. I've thought about knowledge management a lot over the last 20 years, since I built a Wiki/bug tracker system (this was before anything except Bugzilla existed). I think knowledge management systems can work if the "management" side is a side effect of their use.
  - hn_check 6y ago
    Absolutely, if management is entirely invested in it, and it becomes a mandatory part of the process (e.g. updating the wiki is a part of a release or new build), it can be a critical resource. The problem is that the organic nature of wikis lead to people believing that it will just emerge, in the same way that the relatively unstructured wikipedia eventually became a critical resource. But citing wikipedia is often folly. The man hour to output ratio of wikipedia is absolutely enormous. It is an extraordinarily inefficient process that works because there are millions of people moving, structuring, contributing, making templates, rewording, reorganizing, etc. Eventually greatness emerged.
    - rpdillon 6y ago
      I agree. The biggest difference that came to mind when I read your comment is that a personal wiki doesn't have the economy of scale that Wikipedia has. With Wikipedia, the effort of hundreds to organize everything can benefit millions. With a personal wiki, the dynamic is different. I 100% agree that there's a real risk of a 'honeymoon period' giving a false sense of ROI, and I've fallen victim to early enthusiasm about various organizations strategies that ended up not lasting more than a month. I've resorted to a to-do list and a chronological work log as mechanisms that require little organizational investment but yield many of the benefits of a more sophisticated system.
greggman3 6y ago
I ran my own personal wiki in like 2004 - 2008. I'm not sure too cumbersome is the word I'd use. I just never found it that useful. Today though Google Docs, Keep, Notes, Github Gists, github itself, and many other places I can easily store notes and access from anywhere. No reason to setup a wiki and have to maintain it myself.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  For me, the problem after 10+ years is how disjointed all of the data becomes and how much data you generate across the web. I have stuff that means something to me scattered across every service and every account. When you start to plan how to move all of your stuff under one umbrella, the solution starts to sound a lot more like a wiki on paper, I think. Even if you move all this stuff to your filesystem, I think you still need a layer over it to manager it all -- or at least I did. Of course, it's not the only answer. And I admit I have been contributing to wikis like Wikipedia and UESP for a decade now and the jump to a personal wiki was a no brainer. But I wonder, what solution would you consider for this "disjointed data" problem? Do you just not see it as a problem? One of the first things I did when I stood up a personal wiki was to log into ancient google accounts to exfiltrate ancient google docs that I'm glad I found again.
  - pdfernhout 6y ago
    I know what you mean. I've made comments over the years to Slashdot, Soylent News, HackerNews, Disqus, WordPress blogs, Wikis, various other special sites, and so on and would like to see that all together and be archived -- especially when sites disappear. It's sad that people made all these centralized web services (often to make money by getting between people and their data) and thus displaced a lot of email instead of people making email better. There is a lot to be said for a local email system like Thunderbird as a knowledge base that goes back for decades. That is true even if email tools could be better if they were more generalized or if they had easier ways to publish stuff from email to the web and ingest stuff from the web back into to the local system. Some related ideas by me from 2015 which I am still working towards on-and-off in my spare time: https://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html https://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html My latest experiment (in Mithril/HyperScript/Tachyons/Node.js) integrates a file browser, markdown viewer and editor, and email viewer (although it is all still very rough): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15 https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15 But ultimately what we probably need more than tools are simple and popular standards for encoding information that can be linked together. Email (in MIME format) is one such standard but it is fairly complex. Maybe a JSON schema or RDF schema for linked information might help with that. Or something like tags or RDF triples embedded in Markdown -- something I started playing with in Twirlip15 (inspired in part by Foam). Code for a foam-like "Ideas" app using markdown, triple parsing, and Cytoscape: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a749d80fa2102588b583d508bbb/client/ideas.js https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a7... And one example file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c78466f3980722ac465a83430a2026/client/test-ideas-examples/root.md https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c7846...
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Btw, TiddlyWiki is very, very simplistic and limited. I've used it for years for throwaway note-taking yet have a hard time equating it to the other "full" wikis. It just became an append-only log for me with very limited organizational power. Though I do like it for anything just long enough where a single .txt file doesn't cut it. Tiddly is great for that case because it encapsulates the common task of jumping between the same sections over and over -- the real downside of a large file. But you aren't alone in finding it's not so great on a larger scale. So if you did like the idea of a wiki but weren't diddly with the Tiddly, might be worthwhile to check out something like DokuWiki or MediaWiki.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  https://tiddlyroam.org/ https://tiddlyroam.org/ is another alternative, but Tiddly* kind of feels like a dead end. The big upside is the lack of dependencies (just a file), but when the wiki grows you soon have a 70 MB html file that kills your browser. I know there's the node.js version too, but then I might as well use MediaWiki (even more portable).

> I just got into it two days ago This is the rub. I started a tiddlywiki last year, and stuck with it for several months, but now it has fallen to the wayside as too cumbersome.

hn_check 6y ago

This is the problem with a good percentage of advice and life/career hacks on HN -- they're always spoken of in the early, idealist stage. Before the reality has set in. Before the downsides have made their presence known. I've been in a number of firms with wiki knowledge systems. In 100% of the cases it was a wasteland of derelict knowledge that had been abandoned and was usually much more destructive than beneficial. No one was going to undertake the process of keeping it up to date, and at the same time the emergent organization/structure of information was constantly evolving, and wikis are terrible at evolving with that unless you literally have people whose sole job is making templates deciding on the ontology, etc. Similarly, countless people have tried to organize their lives into tools like wiki. And in the early days it seems magical. I suspect the failure rate would be somewhere barely under 100% at the one month mark.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
I don't really understand your take-away except for a cynical "bah, nothing ever works so don't try." Or maybe it annoys you that you didn't see some trite platitudinal disclaimer in my post about how how life is all about trade-offs and what works for Bob might work for Alice. It's like you're about to tell me that exercising doesn't pay off because it's hard to stick with a strategy. "Heh, let's see if he's still doing pushups in a year." You don't seem to realize you're just describing literally all systems. How organized is everyone's filesystem and ~/Documents folder? It's pure chaos with the only sweet release being that you might not carry it over when you upgrade computers and get to start from scratch. Will I be maintaining my localhost wiki in a year? I don't know. But it's worth a shot. After two days it's already 1000x organized than even my best efforts so far. Is it for everyone? Nothing is for everyone. But your comment seems to suggest that you think the alternative to <organization strategy> is organized data which obviously isn't the case. What you will realize is that there is no perfect one-size-fits-all strategy. All you can do is try things and see if they work for you, and see if you stick with them years later. So, for today, I recommend trying some localhost wiki options in your battle against chaos. If it doesn't work for you, so what?
- hn_check 6y ago
  >"I don't really understand your take-away except for a cynical "bah, nothing ever works so don't try." Or maybe it annoys you that you didn't see some trite platitudinal disclaimer in my post about how how life is all about trade-offs and what works for Bob might work for Alice." The take away is clearly "things that work in the small often don't work in the large. If you're taking life advice, take it from someone who has done something for a while and had a reasonable experience.". Someone crowing about their two day experience is...well... This applies to all sorts of similar enthusiastic advice. Intermittent napping. Standing desks. The Dvorak keyboard. Drinking your coffee with butter. New diets. Going without the internet. Meditating. Taking up karate. Working in parks. Whatever. There's a lot of wisdom and knowledge among them, but it isn't coming from the guy who just started. If someone is giving a sales pitch for a lifestyle change based upon a tiny experience, they are often doing it because they think converting others makes it more real/more likely to yield the change they want. It doesn't work that way. Try things. Try lots of things. Save evangelizing until you maybe have a real experience?
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Ah, so worthless cynicism and condescension after all. I see why you made a novelty account for this. But I wonder if you see the irony in promoting yourself into this role of inquisitor? I get it, you're mad that I admitted I only have two days of experience while telling people how to get started in one of the most important software platforms in the world (it's how Wikipedia works) -- I'm not exactly making new sounds on this. Maybe you're fine with my install instructions, but I went too far (for your tastes) when I said it was promising so far. And you thought this behavior needed to be called out by your "Dunning-Kruger in the wild" meme account. I don't think I've misinterpreted the situation, I just find it a bit sad and I wonder how much you think you've added to the discussion. That you run that account, you must think: "quite a bit!" I'll leave that one up to the audience.
    - hn_check 6y ago
      >"Ah, so worthless cynicism and condescension after all. I see why you made a novelty account for this. But I wonder if you see the irony in playing this sort of inquisitor?" You are irrationally hostile. My comments are not for your edification or service, and this is a shared platform where multiple people are reading and deriving value, each comment kicking off different thoughts and conversations. If you take this so incredibly personally, that's a you problem. Your internalization and repeated attacks are bizarre. But you do you.
nl 6y ago
I agree with this for the most part. I've thought about knowledge management a lot over the last 20 years, since I built a Wiki/bug tracker system (this was before anything except Bugzilla existed). I think knowledge management systems can work if the "management" side is a side effect of their use.
- hn_check 6y ago
  Absolutely, if management is entirely invested in it, and it becomes a mandatory part of the process (e.g. updating the wiki is a part of a release or new build), it can be a critical resource. The problem is that the organic nature of wikis lead to people believing that it will just emerge, in the same way that the relatively unstructured wikipedia eventually became a critical resource. But citing wikipedia is often folly. The man hour to output ratio of wikipedia is absolutely enormous. It is an extraordinarily inefficient process that works because there are millions of people moving, structuring, contributing, making templates, rewording, reorganizing, etc. Eventually greatness emerged.
  - rpdillon 6y ago
    I agree. The biggest difference that came to mind when I read your comment is that a personal wiki doesn't have the economy of scale that Wikipedia has. With Wikipedia, the effort of hundreds to organize everything can benefit millions. With a personal wiki, the dynamic is different. I 100% agree that there's a real risk of a 'honeymoon period' giving a false sense of ROI, and I've fallen victim to early enthusiasm about various organizations strategies that ended up not lasting more than a month. I've resorted to a to-do list and a chronological work log as mechanisms that require little organizational investment but yield many of the benefits of a more sophisticated system.

greggman3 6y ago

I ran my own personal wiki in like 2004 - 2008. I'm not sure too cumbersome is the word I'd use. I just never found it that useful. Today though Google Docs, Keep, Notes, Github Gists, github itself, and many other places I can easily store notes and access from anywhere. No reason to setup a wiki and have to maintain it myself.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
For me, the problem after 10+ years is how disjointed all of the data becomes and how much data you generate across the web. I have stuff that means something to me scattered across every service and every account. When you start to plan how to move all of your stuff under one umbrella, the solution starts to sound a lot more like a wiki on paper, I think. Even if you move all this stuff to your filesystem, I think you still need a layer over it to manager it all -- or at least I did. Of course, it's not the only answer. And I admit I have been contributing to wikis like Wikipedia and UESP for a decade now and the jump to a personal wiki was a no brainer. But I wonder, what solution would you consider for this "disjointed data" problem? Do you just not see it as a problem? One of the first things I did when I stood up a personal wiki was to log into ancient google accounts to exfiltrate ancient google docs that I'm glad I found again.
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  I know what you mean. I've made comments over the years to Slashdot, Soylent News, HackerNews, Disqus, WordPress blogs, Wikis, various other special sites, and so on and would like to see that all together and be archived -- especially when sites disappear. It's sad that people made all these centralized web services (often to make money by getting between people and their data) and thus displaced a lot of email instead of people making email better. There is a lot to be said for a local email system like Thunderbird as a knowledge base that goes back for decades. That is true even if email tools could be better if they were more generalized or if they had easier ways to publish stuff from email to the web and ingest stuff from the web back into to the local system. Some related ideas by me from 2015 which I am still working towards on-and-off in my spare time: https://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html https://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html My latest experiment (in Mithril/HyperScript/Tachyons/Node.js) integrates a file browser, markdown viewer and editor, and email viewer (although it is all still very rough): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15 https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15 But ultimately what we probably need more than tools are simple and popular standards for encoding information that can be linked together. Email (in MIME format) is one such standard but it is fairly complex. Maybe a JSON schema or RDF schema for linked information might help with that. Or something like tags or RDF triples embedded in Markdown -- something I started playing with in Twirlip15 (inspired in part by Foam). Code for a foam-like "Ideas" app using markdown, triple parsing, and Cytoscape: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a749d80fa2102588b583d508bbb/client/ideas.js https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a7... And one example file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c78466f3980722ac465a83430a2026/client/test-ideas-examples/root.md https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c7846...

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Btw, TiddlyWiki is very, very simplistic and limited. I've used it for years for throwaway note-taking yet have a hard time equating it to the other "full" wikis. It just became an append-only log for me with very limited organizational power. Though I do like it for anything just long enough where a single .txt file doesn't cut it. Tiddly is great for that case because it encapsulates the common task of jumping between the same sections over and over -- the real downside of a large file. But you aren't alone in finding it's not so great on a larger scale. So if you did like the idea of a wiki but weren't diddly with the Tiddly, might be worthwhile to check out something like DokuWiki or MediaWiki.

unicornporn 6y ago
https://tiddlyroam.org/ https://tiddlyroam.org/ is another alternative, but Tiddly* kind of feels like a dead end. The big upside is the lack of dependencies (just a file), but when the wiki grows you soon have a 70 MB html file that kills your browser. I know there's the node.js version too, but then I might as well use MediaWiki (even more portable).