I did start similar things over 10 years ago. Where I am at these days is just text files ( markdown ) nested into folder structures. I've found this the most sustainable for quite a few years and it's been super useful. Main thing is, do whatever, as long as you find it easy to sustain.

This is what finally replaced Google Keep for my shopping list and then eventually everything else. I use Markor and Syncthing on my phone, and a standard text editor on my various computers. It is super nice especially to be able to organize the directory using standard file management tools, search using grep and friends, etc. There is something to be said for simplicity.

+1 for Markor, also available on fdroid

I use markdown too, in a git repo - mainly so I can access them from anywhere, but versioning is occasionally useful too.

Exactly, I wanted something more structured. The filesystem doesn't give me any organizational tools that I want.

My point is to see how easy it is to set up (I used to always equate PHP with having to get a whole WAMP stack online) thus how easy it is to try for yourself.

If you use vscode you should look into the dendron add-on.

> I tried DokuWiki at first (has flat file db which is cool). It's simpler, but I ended up going with MediaWiki which is more powerful, and aside from Wikipedia using it, I noticed most big wikis I use also use it (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page). MediaWiki lets you choose Sqlite as an option, so I have one big wiki/ folder sitting in my Dropbox folder symlinked into my iCloud folder and local fs.

or you can just use Zim which is a cross-platform desktop app which does not need any setup and simply save files as text files in markdown : https://zim-wiki.org

There definitely are a lot of options to check out (one of the reasons I went with MediaWiki). I recommend playing with them to get a feel for where they diverge from one another. You may find features in some that you decide are necessary for you that a marketing list of bullet points can't get across.

> 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.

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.

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?

The point isn’t to be cynical and say nothing works, it’s to look at what works over the long term (at least >2 years).

The only thing I’ve ever heard of working on this time scale is plain text files. Maybe with some tool over the top to make it easier to manage than just with an editor, but in the end just plain text.

The skepticism is not unwarranted. Borrowing your exercise example, it would be like saying you do X pushups every day and it changed your life, and then saying you've been doing that for a couple days. Wikis are infamous for not working out on the long term.

I have 10 years experience of editing wikis. I just never thought to start one for myself until two days ago.

If there's something so fundamentally different about running a wiki for yourself on localhost vs a collaboration like Wikipedia or UESP, then why not put some skin into the game and make that point? That sounds like an interesting topic.

I don't even understand the "skepticism". MediaWiki is one of the ubiquitously used platforms in the world via Wikipedia. Nothing about my post hinges on you taking my word, the point was that it will take you a few minutes to get it running yourself, so just try it.

Sure, maybe I came off a little strong by saying that it changed my life. But I have enough life experience to realize when I've encountered something big for me. And being able to organize some of my "lost causes" in a couple days has already made an impact on my daily workflow in a massive way, like for the first time in my life, I feel like I have a grip on my digital existence. I could go into more detail if anyone actually cared the same way I could tell you how moving to Mexico City changed my life after just two days.

Maybe you would walk away from that convo saying that my bar is too low to be using that phrase. Fair enough. But logging into a throwaway to trash it with adolescent glee is a practice in the least charitable interpretation, not someone who wants to have an honest conversation. "Um, there's no way that Mexico City changed your life in just two days" just seems like a nonstarter to me, and rather combative.

If you're skeptical, why not ask how it supposedly changed my life, and we go from there? I glossed over the details of that in my post because, well, that wasn't the point of my post. I just kinda reject this modern attack-dog culture on the internet where you supposedly have to couch everything you say in a front-loaded defense lest someone finds a way to attack you for it instead of probing for more info on it before reaching their conclusion, especially when it's a negative one.

My MediaWiki folder is almost 100gb large and I've been putting a lot of work into regaining control of everything I've built, digitally, in 10 or more years. Yes, it has already changed my life. Though this thread is already far too derailed with walls of text to have that convo here, I think.

Just try it and make your own decision. That was my point from the very first post.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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/aa75ed1be5dc4a7...

And one example file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c7846...

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.

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'm getting back into the Zettelkasten note-taking technique which is like a tech-agnostic wiki system (it was originally implemented using physical cards). I originally tried a personal wiki but it was just more tech overhead than I cared to deal with. Plain markdown files with zettelkasten are doing it for me now. Zettlr adds some nice features like adding an easy ability to tag files (just hashtags in the markdown) and search files by tags. It all feels more freeform/lightweight than a wiki server.

I've been running wikis the last 20 years, but I too use static files for note taking, a wiki is not for everything IMHO. Zettelkasten just feel like a low tech wiki to me. Is it really that great or is it just the simplicity that makes you a convert?

I admittedly have not been using it long enough for it to come into its own (when the connections should start to do more heavy lifting). But my impression so far is that the "low tech wiki" description is essentially accurate, although since I keep all my files in one folder, I find it easier to get an overview of what topics I've already covered. I guess there's probably a page for this in most wiki systems as well, but I'm not a wiki power-user.

The reason I'm a convert is that it seems like the best of both worlds between raw note-taking and a wiki. The advantage over raw note-taking is the links that enable you to "crawl" its entirety. The advantage over a wiki is that it's tech-agnostic and you can do it however works best for you.

On the other hand, a wiki may be better for someone who wanted to embed media in their notes (such as audio recordings).

I started writing a master thesis in a MediaWiki a long time ago. Did not work for me, maybe lack of keeping a proper index. It was a data graveyard. On the other hand, so is my whole home folder...

I've been using https://www.zettlr.com/ for a while and can't live without it.

I created a mashup of Zettelkasten + bullet journaling + a linking system based on tagging and IDs that models the fact that knowledge is both hierarchical and associative - i.e. fractal.

Just to throw my hat in the ring here:

My co-founder and I have been building a hosted version of this[1] for the last two years, because we recognized that while self-hosted wikis work great for techie people, there are a lot of other people who that label doesn't fit.

So we've been working to create a collaborative knowledge-base platform built around some key concepts:

1. Built around cards rather than documents, which allows for a lot of interesting and flexible features. Such as...

2. Granular sharing – on Supernotes, you can share an entire collection of cards, or you can share one card at a time. We also have recently introduced[2] a "friends" features that allows you to quickly drag-and-drop cards onto your friends to share with them.

3. Multi-parent nesting – there is no folder-style filesystem on Supernotes, we allow you to nest cards inside of each other. On top of this, we allow for this nesting to be multi-parent, so different users can fit the same cards into their own unique structure (effectively a collaborative / personalized version of symbolic links).

4. Public vs. private tags – cards can be tagged with public tags that everyone sees, but can also be tagged privately with only tags that you can see. This same idea is reflected across the platform, where we want the underlying content to be the same for everyone but want to allow users to personalize the metadata/structure to suit their own workflow.

5. Focus on speed – we have spent a lot of time making Supernotes speedy quick, and try to make it faster every time we release a new feature.

Anyway that is the rough idea. The goal of Supernotes is to be a sort of data-layer where you can keep all these compartmentalized pieces of content (as cards) and then mix-and-match at will to create very simple or very complex stores of knowledge. We also want you to be able to embed these pieces of content elsewhere (say in a Notion document or on your blog) with as little effort as possible (not quite there yet, but will be soon).

[1] https://supernotes.app/

[2] https://supernotes.app/changelog

I like the points you mention here - I took a look at your site and glad to see pricing is easy to find. I myself want to self host, as I don't trust the cloud - but if I was to try your version of this thing, I would lean into the $300 one time payment, as the free tier would be worth the time (20 notes) - and I hate monthly payments and non-owned code.

I did scan of the faq and ended up up on the docs and searched for export. I was pleasantly impressed with the entry which showed an export option along with text and videos showing how to do this.

For me, I probably won't be spending 300 on this when I can wiki or wordpress for free... but if I was not so jaded about saas and cloud, I would be persuaded to check out your thing if you had on the front page like "export, backup" and bonus if it was 'import/export markdown or similar files'

I'd feel less worried about vendor lockin, holding data hostage, what happens when you go bankrupt, etc

the heading fonts on your privacy page are a little wonky in my browser (firefox) - being that you are uk and sharing data with EU and outside the EU - I'd only save info if it was encrypted.. not sure if that is a thing, if so I would make 'privacy built in' a big thing on the front page.

my cents in trying to help, I'm sure 98% of those who may use your service are not as sensitive to the same things I am - so this is not a critique saying it's bad, just offering some random thoughts as I took a look.

Thanks for taking the time to write down your thoughts!

Data ownership is pretty important to us, even though we are only offering a hosted solution, which is why we explicitly say as much in our T&Cs[1]. But yep, we want to make export / backup of your data as easy as humanly possible. The hard part generally is that there are a number of features that exist on Supernotes which just don't exist elsewhere, so even when you use the export feature it is hard to guarantee we can export it in a format that is useful to you.

That is part of the reason we are doing our best to openly document our API[2] so that you can interact with your own content in whatever way you wish (including importing content from wherever or exporting to wherever). Obviously this requires some coding, but we're hoping the community[3] will share any tools they build on top of the API with each other.

Unfortunately E2EE is not quite there yet, as it makes it much more difficult to facilitate sharing when you have E2EE, as well it being a bit of a problem when it comes to a knowledge base if a user loses their private keys and you have to tell them "sorry we can't get your content back – it's all gone". But this is definitely something we are working towards – just takes some time to nail the UX. Since we are definitely never going to sell your data or anything (as per T&Cs), it's better for us if it's E2EE as then it's just one less liability for us from a data protection perspective.

[1] https://supernotes.app/terms/

[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/

[3] https://community.supernotes.app/

I've been using Obsidian for note taking recently, and as much as I really enjoy it - having hypermedia would be quite useful too. I can paste images in Obsidian, but it tends to put the pasted image in the root folder, and I can't display it inline with my notes.

EDIT: VisualEditor, the de facto standard for pasting things like screenshots into your articles seems to be a pain to install. Got my local env up and running though.. Will report back on success with this extension.

I may have misunderstood, but I'm using images in Obsidian without any trouble. Create a folder inside Obsidian, right click it, choose "Use as attachment folder" and then drag and drop / paste images into your documents however you like. It saves to this folder and automatically generates the markup when you put an image in.

TIL. Just tested this out with JPG's, PDFs, text files and screenshots..

Given the complexity of setting up WikiMedia properly, I think I'm going to keep using Obsidian.

I mentioned it elsewhere[1], but conveniently VisualEditor should be getting easier to install in an upcoming Mediawiki release (probably 1.35, which is coming next), because of a bunch of parser centralization work. Fingers crossed, but the hassle that you just went through shouldn't be needed soon.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23907291

For those of you looking for an update - I gave up - the steps for installing the Extension were long and confusing on Mac, then found out Obsidian can use different folders for inline items. I wish you could preview it within the page, but that's OK.

I use Zim for this, backed by Dropbox. It's just text files, and Zim is just an editor, not a server or anything like that.

If I ever tire of keeping a personal wiki for whatever reason, all of the content I've built up in it will remain organized as files within directories.

Came here to say this. I've been using Zim for a little over 2 years, now, and it's become an every-day planning/journaling/notebook/project habit. Lightweight and doesn't get in your face with complexities or demands.

I highly recommend the 'Backlinks' plugin to improve the wiki functionality; leaves Roam standing in the dust for personal use.

+1 for Zim+Syncthing, been using it for almost 2 years now. The only gripe I might have is against the near useless search and proper support for code blocks.

I almost went with MediaWiki, but ended up with DokuWiki. The fresh install of MediaWiki is 154 MB (!) and it's not exactly lightweight. DokuWiki is 10.9 MB and all content is saved in plain text files. Very attractive.

However, backlinks are not possible without hacks. A wiki without backlinks is kind of lame and I could very well use my good old plain text files.

Have you run in to trouble when updating MediaWiki, or is it smooth sailing? SQLite is not mentioned here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

What do you mean by backlinks are not possible? Do you mean in DokuWiki? Each page has a "What links here" button that shows backlinks - that feature is builtin.

Also wanted to get into creating a local 'wiki' or knowledge base. Sadly I didn't hit the sweet spot till now. My requirements are:

- future proof (at least not only a one man project) - Fast search over all informations - Fast creation of quick notes (inbox) - Mobile iOS client

Currently I am stuck with Notion, which has a great 'database' concept. Which is fun to use. Sadly it's too slow. If I want to take a quick note on the go "Google for M6x40 Screws" I need 10-20 seconds with Notion.

I don't even mind paying for such service...

MediaWiki is certainly future proof and has lots of inertia, including a large API surface area, a large ecosystem, and the backing of a deep-pocketed benefactor. An extremely underrated/largely unknown project is Miraheze[0] which is a non-profit that provides free MediaWiki instances to people.

I wish proper wikis hadn't gone by the wayside. (I think it has a lot to do with MediaWiki's default skin being out of style, and people not realizing they can change it.) Most of all, I wish open source projects would stop dumping a bunch of Markdown in a repo somewhere and calling it a "wiki". They're not even close to comparable.

My two biggest complaints about MediawWiki are 1. PHP, and 2. no well-supported way to opt-in to a different syntax like Markdown or AsciiDoc or pretty much anything that isn't MediaWiki-flavored wikitext.

0. https://miraheze.org/

Which "wiki folder" do you refer to? Are you talking about Wiki.JS, or some other wiki engine? I see you mention MediaWiki, are your simple steps for it?

When you click to download DokuWiki, MediaWiki, etc. you are downloading a folder that contains the application as well as an install.php script.

My steps work for all 5 of the wikis I tried before I settled on MediaWiki (though I don't necessarily recommend it to everyone). The install.php script might be in some subfolder, but the website instructions will tell you.

Neither DokuWiki nor MediaWiki (via sqlite) needed to have an external DB running, though some wikis do depend on MySQL.

It was just a quick summary to show how easy it is. e.g. PHP has an embedded server these days.

I'm building my own wiki engine for my website. For now it only turns [words] into

  <a href="words">[words]</a>

meaning out-of the box support for arbitrary hrefs:

  [/absolute_wiki_links]
  [relative_wiki_links]
  [https://external.links]
  [mailto:email@adress.es]

and more!

Vimwiki also works very well.

If you're going to run it locally why not just use Apple Notes app?

If using a web app, it would be better to run it on a $5 server, so if you want to type in something while you're outside with just your phone, you can do that also.

I've been using Notes.app (and every other note-taking app) for years. It has zero organizational power. I don't think anyone would use it if it weren't for the fact that it comes on macOS/iOS and that it's synced by default.

I have thousands of notes in Notes.app across every subject. And moving them into my wiki (categorizing them, linking them) was one of the first thing I did. And one of the best things I've done. Like I had all sorts of stuff in there: stories I've written, lists of things, texts me father sent me, 4 different documents where I had written down birthday/xmas ideas for my girlfriend that I never remembered to check.

These mapped very nicely to pages and categories on my wiki. I even have a page for my girlfriend (globally available on my sidebar) that now has a === Gift ideas === subheader.

One day you just might decide Notes.app is not cutting it for you and that you want better organization. Maybe you won't. I'm in my 30s and didn't do it til now.

I have mine running from Dropbox, so my other computers always have it synced. The real issue is mobile access. It's not something I care about right now but making it internet addressable is certainly something I could do in the future.