Catileptic.tech
Observing personal wikis.
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I have become interested in personal wikis as a way to curate one's own knowledge.

I've asked folx to show me their own wikis or to personal wikis they know about. I was introduced to the electronic quill, which belongs to KatS.

This quest for findind and exploring personal wikis was tirgged by my fascination with a subdomain called helpful on the website of a person I look up to.

After some googling and some browsing of varous webrings, I have collected some more personal wikis. These seem to span the early noughties, and some of them only exist as preserved by the Wayback Machine.

It seems like the "Everything $person Knows" used to be a model of curation of knowledge (sprinkled with a bit of journaling). I wish I could find more of these and I will add them to this blog post, if I stumble across more.

The taxonomy of these wikis feels deeply personal. Reading the top-level categories feels, at first, a little bland - most are these vague nouns. Kind of like reading, on a dating website, that someone is into "travelling". But then, seeing what kinds of articles are subsumed to each category - that's when it gets really interesting! It betrays all kinds of little assumptions and reductions - to continue the dating metaphor, it's more like the conversation you would have on a hiking date, with no cellular coverage and no distractions.

I also found these collections of personal knowledge bases / digital gardens / wikis:

This stuff contains more recent knowledge compendiums, and the personal touch feels a little more dilluted.

Sabina-Alexandra Ștefănescu @ 2025 | Built using Zola (and the apollo theme).