Personal wiki explained

A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.

Personal wiki software can be broadly divided into two categories:

• Multi-user applications with personal editions (such as MoinMoin or TWiki), installed for standalone use and inaccessible to outside users, which may require additional software such as a web server, database management system and/or WAMP/LAMP bundle^[1]
• Applications designed for single users, not dependent on a database engine or web server

Some personal wikis are public, but password-protected, and run on dedicated web servers or are hosted by third parties.

Multi-user wiki software

Multi-user wiki applications with personal editions include:

• MoinMoin desktop edition (written in Python)^[2]
• TWiki for Windows Personal and Certified TWiki (both written in Perl)
• MediaWiki (powers Wikipedia and many other wikis, written in PHP)
• DokuWiki on a Stick (written in PHP), which utilizes plain text files (and thus does not need a database like MediaWiki) and a syntax similar to MediaWiki

Single-user wiki software

There are also wiki applications designed for personal use,^[3] apps for mobile use,^[4] and apps for use from USB flash drives.^[5] They often include more features than traditional wikis, including:

• Dynamic tree views of the wiki
• Drag-and-drop support for images, text and video, mathematics
• Use of OLE or Linkback to allow wikis to act as relational superstructures for multiple desktop-type documents
• Multimedia embedding, with links to internal aspects of movies, soundtracks, notes and comments
• Macros and macro scripting

Notable examples include:

• ConnectedText, a discontinued commercial Windows-based personal wiki system that included full-text searches, a visual link tree, a customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, HTML and HTML Help exporting, and plug-ins^[6]
• Gnote, a port of Tomboy to C++ (although not all plug-ins have been ported)
• MyInfo, a Windows-based free form personal information manager that includes wiki-style linking between notes, full-text search, different views of the note list, and web-site export
• Obsidian, a knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on Markdown files and features a graph-database-like view of connected notes as well as community-made plugins and themes
• org-mode, an Emacs mode that can create documents that are interlinked, converted to HTML, and automatically uploaded to a web server
• TiddlyWiki, a highly customizable personal wiki written in HTML and JavaScript;^[7] it is provided as a single HTML file or multiple Node-js files, features many tools and plugins, and has been in active development since 2004 as free and open-source (BSD) software
• Tomboy, a (LGPL) free software wiki-style note-taking program that allows easy organisation of any hierarchical data, hosted on GNOME CVS
• Vim, which can be used as a personal wiki via plugins such as Vimwiki^[8]
• Zim, a free, open-source standalone wiki based on Python and GTK, with a WYSIWYG editor^[9]

See also

• Card file
• Commonplace book
• Comparison of wiki software
• List of wiki software
• Notetaking
• Outliner
• Personal information manager
• Personal knowledge base
• Personal knowledge management

Notes and References

1. Trapani, Gina, Geek to Live: How to host a personal wiki on your home computer, lifehacker.com, 2005-9-16. Accessed 2012-4-17.
2. Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of MoinMoin, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-23. Accessed 2012-4-17.
3. http://www.wikimatrix.org/search.php?sid=2034 WikiMatrix search for personal wiki software
4. http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/personal+wiki Personal wiki Apps – Android
5. http://lifehacker.com/354005/run-your-personal-wikipedia-from-a-usb-stick Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick
6. Web site: What is ConnectedText? – ConnectedText – The Personal Wiki System . connectedtext.com . 2012-04-17 . https://web.archive.org/web/20221206203035/http://www.connectedtext.com/about.php . 2022-12-06 . dead.
7. Brockmeier, Joe, Weekend Project: Set Up a Personal Wiki on Linux with TiddlyWiki, Linux.com, 2011-3-4. Accessed 2012-4-17.
8. http://vimawesome.com/?q=tag:wiki List of Vim Plugins tagged 'wiki'
9. Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of Zim, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-12. Accessed 2012-4-17.