How can a personal-wiki be used for personal information management ?

Question

I am considering using mediawiki for managing my personal information (code, and other "real life" data). And I would love any tips on how best to do so.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Check out TiddlyWiki and Dropbox, it's a nice combination to not need a hosting. provider. As far as using it, there's a million ways. Did you have a more specific questions about it?

Answer 2

I recommend establishing early a category system (for example hobbies,skying, programming,c++,java,bills) and sticking to this category system as much as you can so things don't get out of hand. In this way, grouping and navigation through your information is made much easier (wikis tend to get too chaotic over time if no authority controls their contents). Other than that, as in real life, it's really up to how you prefeer to organize your stuff!

Answer 3

See Here which recommends TiddlyWiki too. Also Where do you store your code snippets? has various Wiki recommendations.

Answer 4

MediaWiki is a very robust system that if you take advantage of the Category and Template features, can organize a large amount of data. If you have a central server to host your scratchpad wiki on, a more full-featured wiki like MediaWiki may be best, but if you have one computer you're taking notes on, a simple TiddlyWiki install may be best.

For MediaWiki, also take a look at the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, which goes above the Category organization of MediaWiki and allows tabulating data rather well.

Answer 5

Wikis are great for collaboration. Are you intending to collaborate with e.g. friends and family? If not, a light-weight solution is to avoid a wiki altogether and use e.g. Google Docs.

Also consider where you want to store the wiki - on the internet or e.g. on a memory stick?

Answer 6

I've been developing a personal wiki for a few weeks to store memories, develop ideas and organize divergent streams of thought. I recommend dokuwiki. It's super customizable with 300+ plugins, some decent templates and a well documented api.

This wiki uses text files to store pages, no db necessary.

For data needs you could install the sqlite extention, this db is all flat-file. This gives you a grab and go wiki that can be stored on small a usb drive. It's all PHP so you can run it on IIS or Apache, no need to store and run portable LAMPs or WAMPS or other permutations thereof, on the drive.

Learning curve is steeper then most but worth it.