Personal wiki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

References[edit]

  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. ^ WikiMatrix search for personal wiki software, wikimatrix.org. Accessed 2012-4-17.
  4. ^ Personal wiki Apps – Android, androidzoom.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
  5. ^ Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick, lifehacker.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
  6. ^ "What is ConnectedText? – ConnectedText – The Personal Wiki System". connectedtext.com. Archived from the original on 6 December 2022. Retrieved 17 April 2012.
  7. ^ Brockmeier, Joe, Weekend Project: Set Up a Personal Wiki on Linux with TiddlyWiki, Linux.com, 2011-3-4. Accessed 2012-4-17.
  8. ^ List of Vim Plugins tagged 'wiki', Vim Awesome, 2017-02-01. Accessed 2017-02-01.
  9. ^ Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of Zim, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-12. Accessed 2012-4-17.