Recommend me a personal wiki for research?

November 24, 2017 5:07 AM

I come across interesting stuff all the time on the internet which I would like to note electronically.

For example, comments on forums and articles on websites. I would love to have a personal wiki where I can just copy and paste text and add comments.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated?

posted by jacobean to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

TiddlyWiki is the usual recommendation for this.
posted by flabdablet at 5:16 AM on November 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Best answer: It's not a wiki, but Evernote has been my external brain for a while now.
posted by Tamanna at 5:37 AM on November 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

You don't mention an operating system, but if you happen to be on Mac, VoodooPad has been a personal favorite of mine. On Linux: Zim.
posted by Celsius1414 at 5:57 AM on November 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I almost recommended Evernote, but you mentioned a wiki specifically, so I didn't.
Now that Tamanna has recommended it, I will give it a big +1.
I especially LOVE LOVE LOVE the web clipper. It's an amazing way to highlight snippets, or capture complete articles (I prefer the simplified article mode, in that it removes pretty much everything but photos and text).
Catch it on the fly, read it later at my leisure.
Love it so much, I pay for it annually.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 7:15 AM on November 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I use Notational Velocity for this. It's like a slimmed down, nearly text only version of Evernote (it offers the most basic of formatting) that I sync with my phone using Simplenote and for about a decade it's been the perfect, non-bloated repository for text-only everything.
posted by tapir-whorf at 7:56 AM on November 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Seconding Zim here, which also happens to be available for Windows.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:36 AM on November 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Pinboard is great for links and notes, while Dropbox Paper is a slightly-better Google Docs.
posted by migurski at 11:25 AM on November 24, 2017

I use NValt, which is exactly like Notational Velocity but with the addition of Markdown. It doesn't have linking between notes, but it does have very fast search.
posted by adamrice at 12:36 PM on November 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's a little more involved to install than some other suggestions, but I've been very happy with dokuwiki. I switched to it a while back for reasons that probably don't matter to you, but my spouse has a single-user personal install for gathering research notes in an image-and-scanned-text heavy social science field and has been extremely happy with it.
posted by eotvos at 1:17 PM on November 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've used TiddlyWiki since 2011. it's weak point is saving. For the current version there are 9 add-on methods for Windows, 8 for Mac, 5 for Android, etc. Some are browser specific. Some save locally, some to the cloud. I was unable to make some work, despite 17 years programming on PCs and being called a 'power user' since the term was coined. My point is the first step in playing with TiddlyWiki is to successfully save a file.

I use TiddlyDesktop on Windows. Once in your wiki it's just like running in a browser, except the wiki is running in a program. A browser upgrade can't break it. It worked the first time simply by following the installation instructions.
posted by Homer42 at 5:12 PM on November 24, 2017

I tried to use wikis for this (e.g. wiki in a jar) but finally I ended up with nvpy.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 8:07 PM on November 24, 2017

admarice: I use NValt, which is exactly like Notational Velocity but with the addition of Markdown. It doesn't have linking between notes, but it does have very fast search.

Both Notational Velocity and nvALT do support adding links between notes: the syntax is '[[Title of note to link to]]'.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 11:27 AM on November 26, 2017

Response by poster: Yes, I know I asked for a personal Wiki!

Tried all the recommendations but none really stuck with me.

However, Evernote did. Don't know how I ever used the internet without Evernote. As @Tamanna has said, it is indeed like an external brain. And I agre with Major Matt the web clipper tool is great. It has totally changed the way I work.

Thanks everyone.
posted by jacobean at 3:15 PM on December 28, 2017