Best wiki to use as personal notebook (esp. 1. project management, 2. annotated bibliography, 3. science research and notes)

June 22, 2006 2:02 PM

I wondering what the best wiki is to use as a personal notebook. I will be using it for project management (GTD style), but also as an annotated bibliography and for research notes.

Tagging is a must and being server based is preferable.
I've looked into tiddlywiki and stikipad and others, but there's so many and I'm not sure at all what the best requirements for an annotated bibliograph would be for instance (entering a book title, authors, and then notes on it).

posted by Furious Fitness to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Dokuwiki is really easy to setup.
posted by delmoi at 2:27 PM on June 22, 2006

I use MediaWiki for exactly this, and I found the install fairly easy (if you can read docs and use linux even slightly it's cake, no mysql knowledge required). Never done it on windows.
posted by phrontist at 3:07 PM on June 22, 2006

I just signed up with Siteground for a personal wiki.

They will install the script for you. They offer Tikiwiki, PhpWiki and Mediawiki. (Maybe others if you ask.) I'm using Mediawiki just because I am so used to it.

I think the template for an annotated bibliograph is something you have to add on yourself. If using MediaWiki I think the templates would be easy to find and install.

Siteground has great customer service. But they just install the software. You have to tweak it yourself.
posted by cda at 3:30 PM on June 22, 2006

gtdtiddlywiki. Not server based, but a nice adaptation of tiddly.
posted by Mossy at 4:04 PM on June 22, 2006

Instiki is quite nice as well. Simple and easy, without the huge community-oriented structure of MediaWiki.
posted by Coda at 4:40 PM on June 22, 2006

Instiki is great. Might be exactly what you're looking for — it's creator used it for research while in college.
posted by Speck at 4:55 PM on June 22, 2006

Yeah, MediaWiki really is overkill for anything other than large community projects. Its... so... slow...

Personally, I'd go with TiddlyWiki on a thumbdrive. With backups.
posted by blag at 6:01 PM on June 22, 2006

I was using twiki, running off of my laptop, to keep track of my personal and school-related projects.

It uses RCS to keep track of version information. One caveat is that you have to tweak your server/cgi settings to make it run fast, otherwise perl gets started every time you access a page, which makes the wiki dog slow. Once you get it running, it runs perfectly fine.
posted by scalespace at 7:12 PM on June 22, 2006