Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Battle of personal wikis: continued

So, my current assumption is that I need a personal wiki to maintain my personal knowledge base. I really like the idea of cross-linking topics. I also really like the idea of keeping sources (papers) as separate entries, and linking my higher-level cards (ideas, objects, concepts) to them. Finally, if I need to write something, I can always create a separate wiki-tree for it, with a contents, and then some "chapters", linking to the "thoughts" created previously. And then, while writing the text, I can go through all these pages, gradually turning them into a text.

I read a wikipedia page on personal wikis, and decided to give a try to wikidpad as an alternative to One Note. Well... The good thing is that it can save to html really nicely. The bad thing is that the interface is not WYSIWYG, but rather a wiki-style coding thing, and it makes everything somewhat harder. But the worst thing is that in this particular program legal wiki entries should have a "CamelCase" format, with capital letters and everything. That's not what I need as many my terms will look like "AMPA" or "notch". Too hard. Won't work.

OneNote can work as a wiki, and you can "Create Linked Pages" from a word you selected, but it wouldn't autolink words for you, and actually even manually linking your words to existing pages is not that simple. If you have a page named mTOR, and then you type mTOR and want it to link to this page, there's no easy way of doing so. You'll have to go and manually find the page, and copy a link to it, and come back, and add it as a hyperlink. And to make things so much worse, while there's a plugin that allows you to export your notes into html, these within-text hyperlinks are not exportable.

So far the most promising personal wiki app is the one called ZIM. It's wysiwyg, exports to html, is simple to operate, and looks neat. Probably I'll give it a try.