Testing Personal Wiki’s to Manage Research Notes

As part of my ongoing search to find the perfect tools to be able to handle the massive project that IS the PhD, I decided today to look into Personal Wikis.

Why a personal wiki? Research = reading articles, taking notes, highlighting key content and then drawing from this literature to write. In my attempt to minimize work later and do what I can now, my thought is “Taggable and linkable note-taking” will help this process. In essence I want a tool that can allow me to tag key pieces of text and aggregate them later.

Example: The definition of Resilience in a current article I’m reading would be good to use later. Instead of just highlighting it and leaving the paper static in Papers (an excellent tool I use to store all of my articles), I want to extract the information from it so that I can use it later. Using a personal wiki will allow me to paste that text, tag it as “definition” and “resilience”. Later, when I want to write about definitions I can just select both tags from the wiki and see all logged definitions for that concept. 

As such I’ve started doing some research. Note – I am a Mac user, so this discussion only covers Mac compatible products.

List of Personal Wikis Evaluated

Below are some of the wikis I looked into, and that I am currently still testing. Stay tuned for updates!

Bitnami | This one looks pretty tempting. It installs a cloud based version of MediaWiki (the wiki package written for Wikipedia). Given it’s supported by a strong backend and is web-based, I will try this one for a while.

VoodooPad 5 | I like the idea of this one as it’s supposedly more cloud-based, and also has good review here and here. Looks like a good interface. Just installed it and will give it a try for a while.

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1. TiddlyWiki | Tried installing and running with both Safari and Chrome on the mac. The downloaded zip is just an html file (the wiki) and a jar file (for saving the wiki). Installing involves opening the html file and starting to use it. To save edits, the jar file is a java plugin that installs in the browser. Given Java issues on the mac, especially Chrome, the plugin didn’t install easily. So instead, I tried editing the wiki and then downloading the html file and saving it. This worked ok, but when I re-opened the file some of the text was corrupted. I also didn’t like the process of saving. It didn’t feel robust enough to be honest, for years worth of data collection. So I scrapped it.
2. Trunk Notes (Website) | Looks very cool but only works on the iOS. I need one that will work on my Macbook laptop
3. Gollum | runs through Github, looks like of complicated to setup. Might come back to this one.
4. WikiPad | Looked too “text pad” like i.e. courier font.
5. TomBoy | Looks like it might be too basic. That being said I’ll try this one if VoodooPad doesn’t work.

Other Resources on Personal Wikis

If you want to get more advanced, here are a couple sites that explain a bit more on how to combine more tools and more a more powerful, personalized, self-hosted cloud-based shiny new wiki:

Personal Wiki In Your Mac

Personal Wiki Using Github and Gollum on OS X

Here are a few sites talking about personal wikis:

Creating a Personal Wiki on Max OS – Author tried both Voodoo and TrunkNotes and opted for neither due to inability to share the wiki publically

4 of the best personal wikis to keep you organized – Review of TiddlyWiki, WikiPad, Tomboy Notes, Zimwiki (most are windows compatible)

Stay tuned! Will update on how it goes trying Voodoo and Bitnami!