DokuWiki as private personal online wiki for reading notes

Posted by Chris Thompson
Jun 12, 2018 at 07:27 PM

You can link to sections in Notion (see here: https://www.notion.so/Link-directly-to-a-section-on-the-page-1bdf0ef9b8a04e9392cbce77184ec400 ) I don’t think you can link to individual paragraphs within a section yet, but IIRC you can’t do that in DokuWiki either. (For section links to be permanent/stable, you also need a plugin in DokuWiki.)

I’m not sure how often people other than very advanced/academic users want paragraph links, so I can understand why it’s probably a lower priority feature. Tinderbox dropped this feature for three versions (it’s back now, and more powerful) and there wasn’t a huge outcry.

Agreed on the backlinks. That needs to be there, and DokuWiki does have that by default. It’s a little bit less necessary in Notion because there is always a hierarchy where you could in theory find things, whereas a pure wiki can easily end up as a soup of orphan pages, but I’m sure this is on their radar. That team is very productive—they implemented a huge chunk of the Airtable feature set in what was a pretty minor update by their standards.

—Chris

nathanb wrote:
>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?
> >
> >
>