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Introduction: I often dive into some topics quite deeply in order to deal with some private issue. So I spend a lot of time researching, organizing information and coming to my conclusions. Then I can take care of my issue and I'm happy. Half a year later I have the same issue again, but I've already forgotten everything I figured out earlier. So I have to again, spend a lot of time researching, organizing information and coming to conclusions. Somehow my conclusions often differ a bit. I also often have overlapping or related, but not identical issues. So I wanted to figure out a way that I can keep all my hard work from earlier accessible to me in the future.

My solution for this, that I'm pretty happy with, is a personal wiki. I installed MediaWiki on a hosted server, and have a nice knowledge base to work with whenever I'm at a PC (Wikipedia also has a mobile app, so probably MediaWiki can use one as well, but I haven't yet tried to figure that out for me).

The content I put in my wiki is:

  • My thoughts
  • Web-Links
  • Notes from current projects
  • Recounts of my experiences with different issues

I use categories, pages, chapters, links, lists, tables, images. Structured information (for example my training and competition results) go into tables in a relational database.

I've found my wiki to be very helpful, especially when browsing the web and when using different books for the same topic. Besides keeping information that is highly relevant to me easily accessible, it also helps me keep my priorities straight, since due to categories and different chapters, I can see what related topics I have already worked on, and it helps me keep on track and finish things I've already started before starting something new.

How my wiki grows: Currently I'm letting my personal wiki grow naturally. I have a head page and a head category; all other content is in a child relation to these two. If I feel that a page or category is getting too crowded, I divide the existing page and create sub-categories. To help me make easily-related categories, I roughly follow the categories and their relationships as they are on Wikipedia. Sometimes it's a bit abstract, but so far my category relations still make sense to me.

My Problem: I don't have any guidelines to help me write structured content on pages. Often when a page gets too crowded and I split it I am at odds at where to put certain information as it groups well with either of the new pages I create. My categories also become messy when I create sub-categories that have multiple parent categories.

I need your help: I'm reading the Wikipedia How-To and Wikipedia Basic Information, but that place is huge and total overkill for my needs. Can someone tell me the basics for structuring content in a wiki while letting its information base grow naturally? In the long run I need to avoid having my wiki become a foggy mess - I need transparency and readability.

Here are some examples of topics from my wiki:

  • Information Technology Trends (ofc, I use SO, what'd you expect : P)
  • Chess (Puzzles, Game variants)
  • Family planning (Living internationally, Raising children)
  • Athletics (Fitness theory, Training plans)
  • Notes from books that I study (About 6 different books a year)
  • Nutrition (Recipes, Theory)
  • Music (Notes, Explanations)
  • Gardening (Plants, Tools, yearly cycles)
  • DIY (Guides to handy ideas)
  • Work related stuff (a world of its own)
  • ...
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Have you tried OneNote? You can get a free version if you don't have Microsoft office –  Alpar Sep 19 '14 at 17:25

2 Answers 2

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One of the biggest advantages of a wiki format is that it's not a tree structure. You can cross-link from anything to anything, and build a web of information, rather than building silos, which is common in a folder-based, hierarchical system.

My advice is to embrace that aspect of the system. I recommend avoiding categories.

Instead, focus on making each page serve a specific purpose. Some pages will be index pages, containing mostly links and very little base content. Others will be mostly content with a few trails "up" or "out".

As Kramii mentioned, tags are a very powerful way to correlate information without having to embrace a tiered structure. I have no experience trying to using it, but it looks like MediaWiki supports tags through an installable extension. This may be what you need.

I use a personal wiki daily both at work and at home (I use vimwiki), and I've tried a few times to rebuild/refactor my structure. Each time, it's been more of a burden than a gain. Everyone's experience is different, but my advice is to embrace the structure you've got and continue growing naturally.

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up vote 3 down vote

The Problem

The point of your wiki is to take the information you gather now and make it available to your future self.

The value of the information that you keep is determined, in part, by your ability to find it when you need it. One way to make information useful is by adding structure to it, and this is what you're trying to do by organizing your wiki.

My Question

Now, my question to you is this: is applying structure to your information the most effective way of making it manageable? There are several issues that you'll need to overcome:

  1. Coming up with a good structure is hard
  2. Applying the structure is time-consuming
  3. There will always be bits of information that don't really fit your current structure
  4. Changing the structure in the future can be hard
  5. The structure you impose now may not fit the information you gather in the future
  6. The structure you impose now may not reflect the way you want to view your information in the future.

Now, all these issues can be overcome when you have a large body of helpers to keep your information in order, but when you're running a personal wiki, they can become overwhelming.

So, I have to ask, are you really solving the right problem? Could there be a better way to manage your information?

A Proposal

There alternative ways to make information manageable and accessible. One of these is to stop worrying about structure and make the information easily searchable.

This has worked exceptionally well for Google, whose search technology quickly overtook the sites like Yahoo that tried to organize the web into categories. The big advantage of making information searchable is that you don't have to do so much work up-front, but effectively impose order on information only when you need to.

Another alternative is to use a simple tagging system. For example, all your documents about chess get a "chess" tag, and your gardening articles get a "gardening" tag, and so on. That way, your information has a loose structure, but you don't have to spend as much effort as you would with a full wiki.

Practical Steps

Now, if your wiki platform supports these alternative methods of organization then you're good to go. If not, perhaps you're using the wrong tool to solve your problem. If that is the case, then with the best will in the world, helping you use that tool better really isn't an effective way to solve the underlying problem.

So, are you asking the right question? Rather than asking about how best to use a wiki, should you instead be asking about approaches to managing large amounts of information?

What I Do

I did try using a wiki. They're great tools, and we use one at work to manage shared documentation. But for my personal information, I found the wiki just took too much effort to maintain. So I switched to using Evernote, which allows me to organize notes into notebooks, to add tags and (most importantly) has a superb search facility. It isn't perfect, and it doesn't work for everything, but it is a good solution for where I am today.

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whats the first thing you would change about Evernote? –  Manuel Hernandez Sep 19 '14 at 20:29
    
+1 for abandoning a fixed structure and relying on search. My approach approach is a folder with plain text files + notational velocity or nvAlt for search, which makes this a light weight but limited setup. –  0x6d64 Sep 20 '14 at 14:06
    
This is pretty much the answer I'd have written. I've followed the same path of trying a wiki, and discovering that Evernote is better for keeping reference information and finding it later when I want it. –  Dennis S. Sep 22 '14 at 17:40
    
@manuelhe the company management –  Raystafarian Sep 23 '14 at 13:20

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