A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.
Personal wiki software can be broadly divided into two categories:
- Multi-user applications with personal editions (such as MoinMoin or TWiki), installed for standalone use and inaccessible to outside users, which may require additional software such as a web server, database management system and/or WAMP/LAMP bundle[1]
- Applications designed for single users, not dependent on a database engine or web server
Some personal wikis are public, but password-protected, and run on dedicated web servers or are hosted by third parties.
Multi-user wiki software[edit]
Multi-user wiki applications with personal editions include:
- MoinMoin desktop edition (written in Python)[2]
- TWiki for Windows Personal and Certified TWiki (both written in Perl)
- DokuWiki on a Stick (written in PHP), which utilizes plain text files (and thus does not need a database) and a syntax similar to MediaWiki
Single-user wiki software[edit]
There are also wiki applications designed for personal use,[3] apps for mobile use,[4] and apps for use from USB flash drives.[5] They often include more features than traditional wikis, including:
- Dynamic tree views of the wiki
- Drag-and-drop support for images, text and video, mathematics
- Use of OLE or Linkback to allow wikis to act as relational superstructures for multiple desktop-type documents
- Multimedia embedding, with links to internal aspects of movies, soundtracks, notes and comments
- Macros and macro scripting
Notable examples include:
- ConnectedText, a commercial Windows-based personal wiki system that includes full-text searches, a visual link tree, a customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, HTML and HTML Help exporting, and plug-ins[6]
- Gnote, a port of Tomboy to C++ (although not all plug-ins have been ported)
- org-mode, an Emacs mode that can create documents that are interlinked, converted to HTML, and automatically uploaded to a web server
- TiddlyWiki, a highly customizable personal wiki written in HTML and JavaScript[7]; it is provided as a single HTML file or multiple Node-js files, features many tools and plugins, and has been in active development since 2004 as free and open-source (BSD) software with an active community
- Tomboy, a (LGPL) free software wiki-style note-taking program that allows easy organisation of any hierarchical data, hosted on GNOME CVS
- Vim, which can be used as a personal wiki via plugins such as Vimwiki[8]
- WikidPad, a free, open-source standalone wiki notebook/outliner with such features as dynamic tree generation, topic tagging, auto-completion, full-text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, and image and file control
- Zim, a free, open-source standalone wiki based on Python and GTK, with a WYSIWYG editor[9]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Trapani, Gina, Geek to Live: How to host a personal wiki on your home computer, lifehacker.com, 2005-9-16. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of MoinMoin, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-23. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ WikiMatrix search for personal wiki software, wikimatrix.org. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ Personal wiki Apps – Android, androidzoom.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick, lifehacker.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ What is ConnectedText?, ConnectedText – The Personal Wiki System, connectedtext.com. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ Brockmeier, Joe, Weekend Project: Set Up a Personal Wiki on Linux with TiddlyWiki, Linux.com, 2011-3-4. Accessed 2012-4-17.
- ^ List of Vim Plugins tagged ‘wiki’, Vim Awesome, 2017-02-01. Accessed 2017-02-01.
- ^ Zukerman, Erez, Editorial Review of Zim, PCWorld, pcworld.com, 2012-3-12. Accessed 2012-4-17.
