DokuWiki as private personal online wiki for reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 2, 2018 at 10:10 PM

DokuWiki has been mentioned a few times on this forum.

Those of you that have used it, would you think the following would work conveniently enough (as a reading notes database and as a workflow)?

I’m thinking of setting up DokuWiki as a self-hosted wiki on A2Hosting (subscription-based).

I’d like to be able to use it as a private, personal wiki for my reading notes.

I’d want to be able to create my notes via a web interface, add categories, links to PDF files, insert the occasional image (normally just a screenshot of a diagram), and of course create links between them.

The other use would be to browse the reading notes, annotate them further, and search them.

I may also want to import my existing reading notes database from ConnectedText.

My main motivation for the above is to free myself from my current setup which lockes me into a Windows laptop. My reading notes reside in CT, my references are in EndNote, with links from both CT and EndNote to PDFs of articles and books on the harddrive.

This setup often limits me, as my Windows laptop is heavy and so it’s not always with me, and I prefer to use my Chromebooks whenever I can.

As I often do my reading on a Chromebook these days, I’d prefer to be able to directly type my reading notes into an online wiki (open in a Chrome tab), if the interface makes that easy enough.

Why DokuWiki? I compared several and that one appeals to me, as it looks the closest to CT, both in terms of being plain text-based and the syntax, and it sounds like it has a good search facility.

I still love CT, but not being able to have it with me constantly is frustrating, so I’d want to replicate it online (and the associated toolchain, i.e. my references database and my PDF library—finding online solutions for those is less problematic, as I could use Paperpile, and Google Drive).