Personal wiki

A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without the need for collaboration by multiple users.

Personal wiki software can be broadly divided into multi-user wiki software with personal editions, and those wiki applications that are designed only for single users, not depending on a database engine and a web server. The first class includes wiki applications such as MoinMoin or TWiki, as these can be installed for standalone use as well. This may require installing additional software, for example a web server, a database management system, or a WAMP/LAMP software bundle. Nevertheless, this does not mean the wiki must be accessible to outside users.^[1]

Some personal wikis are public but password-protected, running either on their own webservers or hosted by third parties. This has the advantage that the personal space can be accessed and edited from any computer or PDA with a web browser.^[2]

Multi-user wiki software

Multi-user wiki applications with personal editions:

• MoinMoin (written in Python) has a desktop edition.^[3]
• TWiki (written in Perl) has TWiki for Windows Personal and Certified TWiki.
• DokuWiki (written in PHP) has Dokuwiki on a Stick – it works on plain text files and thus does not need a database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki and makes sure the data files remain readable outside the wiki.

Single-user wiki software

There are also wiki applications specifically designed for personal use^[4] apps for mobile use,^[5] and apps for USB stick use.^[6] Their feature set often differs from traditional wikis; examples are:

• 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, in particular wikis where one can link to internal aspects of movies and sound tracks and store notes / comments
• Macros and macros constructors. Also often support for alien macros so the wiki can act as a multi scripting macro system

WikidPad Screen shot

Notable examples of such software include:

• ConnectedText is a commercial Windows-based personal wiki system with many advanced features, including: full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, exports to HTML and HTML Help, and plug-ins.^[7]
• Gnote is a port of Tomboy to C++, not all plug-ins ported
• org-mode is an Emacs mode that can create documents that are interlinked, converted to HTML, and automatically uploaded to a web server.
• TiddlyWiki is a BSD licensed, single file, self-modifying HTML + JavaScript based personal wiki^[8]
• Tomboy is a (LGPL) free software program for note-taking in a wiki-like manner. Simple editing and retrieval methods are provided. The program allows for easy organisation of any hierarchical data. The Tomboy project is hosted on GNOME CVS.
• Vim can be used as a personal wiki via plugins.
• WikidPad is a free, open-source standalone wiki notebook/outliner with many features, such as dynamic tree generation, topic tagging, auto-completion, full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control etc.
• Zim is a free, open-source standalone wiki based on Python and GTK with a WYSIWYG editor.^[9]

See also

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

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. Falconer, Joe, The Quick & Dirty Guide to Personal Wikis, lifehack.org, 2008-7-14. Accessed 2012-4-17.
3. Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of MoinMoin, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-23. Accessed 2012-4-17.
4. WikiMatrix search for personal wiki software, wikimatrix.org. Accessed 2012-4-17.
5. Personal wiki Apps - Android, androidzoom.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
6. Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick, lifehacker.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
7. What is ConnectedText?, ConnectedText - The Personal Wiki System, connectedtext.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
8. Brockmeier, Joe, Weekend Project: Set Up a Personal Wiki on Linux with TiddlyWiki, Linux.com, 2011-3-4. Accessed 2012-4-17.
9. Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of Zim, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-12. Accessed 2012-4-17.

External links

• List of personal wiki software on WikiWikiWeb