incoherence.net

My latest obsession in efficiency are wikis.

You’ve probably heard of ‘em: besides running Wikipedia, you’ve probably contributed to or consulted a corporate wiki if you ever held a desk job. For those who haven’t, they’re a system of documents, easily editable with specialized markup for organizing data (usually via tables and lists), easily linkable between pages (e.g., Wikipedia articles), and easily editable by multiple writers (via keeping a history of changes). They’re a step up from random text files and lengthy email exchanges, at least in a collaborative environment.

But what I wanted to set up was a personal wiki. Discarding all the benefits of multiple editors, I figured just the inter-document hyperlinking and data organization was good enough reason to try using one. I admittedly got the idea from a Lifehacker article, but my requirements were a bit different. Given the spectacularly diverse selection of wiki implementations catering to combinations of possible needs, it took me a bit of time figuring out what I wanted:

• Ease of installation. I dropped this one early on, when I realized most wiki systems were created by software geeks, and probably targeted software geeks as well. That is, they’re not mainstream enough to cater to random passersby, so I conceded the necessity of mucking with wiki source code. Yuck.
• Aesthetically pleasing UI. In other words, the ideal wiki should be skinnable or at least styleable.
• Customization options. I wanted the ability to install plugins and tweak how the wiki worked…without having to understand the entirety of the source code. It’s amazing how many open-source projects are completely developer-centric and written only to cater to the developer’s needs at the time.
• Stand-alone server install. I’ll need to access this wiki from a variety of sources - home, work, possibly iPhone - so putting it on a server made the most sense, specifically my own since I pay for hosting anyway. Bonus points if I can sync a local wiki copy.
• Actively maintained and developed, with generous documentation and support. Because nothing sucks quite like wasting time setting up broken software long abandoned to the nether regions of the web, forever denied the dignity of death by random wiki enthusiasts.
• Free. Why pay when excellent open-source solutions exist?

Ironically, a wiki would have been a great place to track these notes.

They helped narrow the field a bit though, especially considering most wikis had collaborative problems to solve. I tried out everything satisfying most of the criteria above:

• Mediawiki. Wikipedia-like, has way too many features for personal use from an installation/maintenance standpoint.
• Tiddlywiki. Wiki-like framework specially created for personal use. Powerful, but puts everything in one giant file meant to be stored on your local machine, wrecking havoc when trying server backups.
• Wikkawiki. Small and lightweight, but hard to customize and not much community support.
• PmWiki. Similar to Wikkawiki but doesn’t require a database, with lots of really nice documentation, and some nice skins. Weird tagging system, though.

In the end, I settled on PmWiki, mostly because of their community and documentation. Check it out at wikincoherence. ⁽¹⁾

And if all this talk about wikis doesn’t make you want to set one up, try out its lesser brethren Google Docs and Google Notebook for all your online group-writing and note-taking needs.

1. As of this writing, all I have up are a few lists on games and some password-protected work stuff. I’ve been more excited about setting up the wiki than actually using it… (↩)