DokuWiki as private personal online wiki for reading notes

Posted by nathanb
Jun 12, 2018 at 06:04 PM

>Chris Thompson wrote:
>Given your concerns, if you haven’t tried it, you should give Notion.so
>a shot as an alternative to Dokuwiki.

Thank you for mentioning this. I’ve recently discovered notion and have been poking around with it. It’s part of a new breed of cloud-based-apps that seem to be trying to replace the classic file/document/spreadsheet concept with hybrid databases that can act like wiki’s, web sites, share documents, to-do lists etc by mixing all those elements within pages. Others of this ilk (I think) would be quip, etherpad, dropbox paper, and nuclino. I think quip and nuclino look and act most like notion. Of course they all pretend to be revolutionary, and I guess they sort of are, but it’s kind of funny to see how similar they appear and behave. I think of airtable as part of this new generation, since they are all free-form blank slates powered by an accessible database. Airtable obviously isn’t built to wiki but is a fantastic database. I recently built a team project-management portal with airtable and was impressed at how easy it was to get even the most change-resistant coworkers to enjoy keeping it up to date and using it as our dashboard.

Notion is my favorite candidate of these ‘next gen’ cloud wiki/database things but I have some reservations. Unless I’m using it wrong, it’s only a wiki in the sense that you can link TO all its elements from within any element. Like people say OneNote can be a personal wiki because you can link TO any particular paragraph. I think it is important to have an incoming-links, what-links-to-here, two-way link, etc for REAL knowledge management wikis. I really love how easy it is to shape a page with a visual grid layout (like OneNote) in notion, like you can make your own little kanban/trello boards and each item in a list/box can be just text or a whole page. But embedding links within elements TO other elements seems to the end of the depth. As far as I can tell, the elements themselves are lacking in a lot of metadata and associating them within other elements only seems to be useful within that particular page.

Hmmm, maybe I’m mistaken. Just played with my example of a ‘dumb’ kanban list, where you might have boxes for to-do, next, doing, done. If you move one task via drag and drop (which notion handles really well), there is no metadata within the task item that indicates the change in status or even lists the status at all since that relationship is specific to what that page is showing. Because I’d like the task to be also nested under a project element and be able to see what the status of all the tasks are per project, per day, whatever. However, notion just introduced airtable-like tables…so maybe I CAN get it to treat the various element arrangements as metadata.

Still, no ‘what links to here’. ;-) A true CRIMPer is NEVER satisfied right?