Personal wiki: setting up wiki conventions
When collaborating with others, we often set up rules on how we’re going to proceed: we work from 8 to 5. We do meetings once a week. Etc. Standards, laws, rules, call them as you wish, we have a natural tendency to create them to make the environment more predictable and stable (among so many other reasons).
Yet there’s no reason you shouldn’t adopt them when working on your own documents, even if you’re not going to share them. Having evolved my own personal wiki for a few years now, I certainly see their benefits. Here I’ll share a few of my own standards and explain the reasons behind them.
They all have a common root: making the structure stable through time, so you can make a page evolve over many years, as slowly as it needs. It’s always fun to revisit a list I’ve started two years ago, add a new point, close the page, and know the structure is still as valid now as it was back then. No need to start everything over because I left the page in the dark for months. No need to reread everything either: I can easily find the place where I wanted to insert the new point, or get the information I needed.
You can think of it as the you-of-now collaborating with the you-of-the-future, in a sense.
The meta-conventions
The first standard I’ll mention is the “wiki meta” page. This is the page where I document my own conventions. This might seem overkill, but it actually helps in shaping the rules and thinking about them (which is a core reason for writing things down: it makes them clearer). In there, I have
- The goals of the wiki; its scope.
- A list of common page sections
- Format and syntax rules
- Guiding principles
- Special keywords and their meaning
I’ll give examples of the content of each of these sections bellow
Common page sections
Perhaps the most useful structural principle I use is the *common sections*. These are similar to common sections you’ll find in a book: table of contents, intro, chapters, conclusion, references, etc. Encyclopedias and Wikipedia page also have patterns in sections. Here’s a list of common sections in my pages, in the order they usually appear on a page:
- Related entries
- To do
- Changelog
- Glossary
- Sources of information
- News
- Events and people
- Experience, common traps and mistakes
These are sections which apply to almost any entry. Of course, other patterns emerge in specific areas of the wiki. But you get the idea.
Guiding principles
These are high-level, perhaps even a bit gnomic or philosophical, statements to guide changes in the wiki. Examples of these are:
- Be precise in meaning, be factual. List references behind noted information to know where it came from, who stands behind it.
- Have a clear top-down structure for division in subtopics in a page, as much as possible.
- Constantly think of better ways to organize the entries.
- Don’t hesitate to link related entries, to move about easily and see structure more clearly.
- Split entries that get too long into subtopics.
Format standards and precise syntactic rules
These are rules I try to follow regarding the meaning of text markup or special notation. For example:
- Highlighting an important point is done by bold (vs capitals, italics, highlighting etc.)
- A new concept or keyword is noted by BOLD AND CAPITAL
- When an information is uncertain or doubtful, mark it with (??)
- Use “–” to indicate subsumption in entry titles (ie. “Mammals — Bear”)
I also have a special syntax for:
- Dates: I date almost every section and bullet point I write. That way, I can clearly see when something appeared, how the page evolved. WikidPad has a keyboard shortcut to insert a date formatted the way you like, by the way.
- Tags: Wiki links do a good job for most structure needs, but I nevertheless use tags here and there for tranversal considerations and classifying subpoints in multiple pages (cf. my related WikidPad extension).
Further reading
I haven’t read it myself, but the Manual of Style of Wikipedia seems interesting if you want some more inspiration for convention ideas.
