Wiki Visions

I may not have been work­ing much on my blog over the last cou­ple months, but one thing I have been work­ing is my own per­sonal wiki.  It’s not pub­licly editable so don’t bother try­ing. One thing I have found that it is use­ful for is an mem­ory aug­men­ta­tion tech­nique.  I can keep notes or lists to myself in it that I can eas­ily go back to.

I’ve got­ten so used to wiki edit­ing and syn­tax that I am now incor­po­rat­ing a stand alone wiki into my nor­mal work flow.   Now some of you do know that I run the Stars of Intre­pid wiki to keep the mem­ory of the peo­ple that played a great game in a great time period alive.   I saw uses for a wiki in this sce­nario long ago, and it’s gone OK.   It would be great if there was a greater par­tic­i­pa­tion, but it is what it is.   A moment trapped in time.  There are mod­i­fi­ca­tions occa­sion­ally, but it’s far from a vibrant community.

The best thing about a per­sonal wiki is you are not dis­mayed when peo­ple are not con­tribut­ing.  It’s all you.   It can be incom­plete.   It can be rid­dled with prob­lems.  It mir­rors your mind, thought process, and line of think­ing.   It is more of what you are.   When­ever I need to write some­thing the wiki is now a well of infor­ma­tion I can go back to, at least htat is part of the intent.

One of the major things I wanted the wiki for (at first) was to keep a list of all of my online pro­files and accounts.   This makes a cen­tral repos­i­tory that I can call upon to remem­ber if I signed up for such and such a ser­vice.   The other thing it’s been use­ful is to map the flow infor­ma­tion that I use for cross­post­ing data across the internet.

When some­one asks a ques­tion of how infor­ma­tion is dis­trib­uted I can give a very spe­cific answer of the path it takes.   Oth­ers can look for them­selves how I might pro­duce a video in youtube and have it show up on vimeo.  If you haven’t tried keep­ing a wiki for your own infor­ma­tion, I sug­gest that you do try it.  It is a dif­fer­ent ani­mal from a blog and is used com­pletely dif­fer­ently.   It’s like com­par­ing a book to an ency­clo­pe­dia, both present infor­ma­tion but in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent manner.