Tiddlywiki – A non-linear personal web notebook
I&#x27;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&#x27;s been really valuable. I think I get a few things out of it:<p>1. Perfect recall. Every little detail I read in a book&#x2F;blog&#x2F;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&#x2F;GIFs and and inserting them in articles- otherwise I don&#x27;t know where I&#x27;d keep them.)<p>2. Reveals what I don&#x27;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. &quot;A cat is an animal that ...&quot;. The process of doing that often reveals gaps in my understanding.<p>3. It makes me better at asking questions when I&#x27;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&#x27;s no reason that should be limited to languages and couldn&#x27;t apply to all things, and things themselves. Some questions I like to ask are &quot;What is the function&#x2F;uses of this thing?&quot; &quot;What are the parts of this thing and how are they arranged?&quot; &quot;How do we make this thing?&quot; &quot;What&#x27;s the history of this thing?&quot; &quot;What subtypes of this thing are there?&quot;<p>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&#x27;s unclear if it&#x27;s worth the tradeoff.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;ll probably forget it in four years, yet most people seem content to do so.<p>If anyone is interested in the specific software I use, here&#x27;s the Github project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ceasar&#x2F;Encyclopedia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ceasar&#x2F;Encyclopedia</a>. 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.<p>Still very primitive compared to what it could potentially be, but combined with regular Unix command line tools it&#x27;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.)