Personal wiki
A personal wiki, personal memex, or digital garden is a website written by one person to collate their thoughts together. It indexes the articles by subject, allowing quick recall of information as it's needed, and links them together, allowing the reader to drift from one related idea to another.
The medium of hypertext inherently lends itself well to making an encyclopedia, as any phrase can link to an article explaining that concept in more detail, using other phrases that in turn link to other articles. This is probably quite appealing to those of us with certain types of ADHD or AuDHD.
In short, a personal wiki is like a person's public notebook or card file, organised like a mini encyclopedia.
Contrast with a blog, also a website written by one person. Unlike a personal wiki, a blog consists of entries listed in reverse chronological order, making it easy to see the latest few entries someone has written, but difficult to find a specific one you're looking for, or related ones.
A personal wiki is like an extension of your memory, that makes it easy to look up things you'd otherwise forget. It also allows you to enthuse about things you're interested in, potentially reaching a large audience of people looking for such information.
In many ways, a personal wiki harkens back to the golden age of the Web, before social media corporations imported techniques from gambling machines to mine people's attention spans.[1] There was a utopian promise of a global hyperlinked library which, to extend the metaphor, was quickly paved over to make a shopping centre.
This website is an example of a personal wiki.
References
- "Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds" Cristina Voinea, Lavinia Marin, Constantin Vică, Springer Nature, Mar 2024
World Wide Web: Blog | Personal wiki
