Personal Wiki

Can PpcSoft iKnow be used as a personal wiki ?

Certainly - it is a great personal wiki !

But first a short explanation for those who don't know what a wiki is:

"A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor"

This definition is from the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia

The essence of the Wiki concept:
- A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site

- Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.

- A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

"Wiki" has been backronymed by some to "What I Know Is" (iKnow is the "short" version of this :-)

Wikis can be very powerful tools, but the downside is that they often require both a database engine and web server, and you often need to use a special markup language to edit the pages.

For personal use, ordinary wikis are often too powerful and too complex.

Personal Wiki

A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis.

There are basically two types of personal wikis:
- multi-user wikis with personal editions
- wiki-applications designed only for single users

PpcSoft iKnow is in the second category:
a desktop application designed for a single users (without the need for a database engine or a web server).

So why would you use a personal wiki ?

The essence of the wiki concept is the ability to edit any page, easily linking pages and constantly changing the content. Editing any page and changing the content constantly are operations that can be done with any text editor for personal use and are therefore not unique features for a personal wiki.

However, linking pages and creating meaningful topic associations between different pages is the main difference between a wiki and a text editor. And this is also the strongest feature of PpcSoft iKnow !

You will normally use a special format to link pages in Wikis. For example, you may use CamelCase (capitalizing initial letters) like "ConnectNotes", or use markup language like Wikipedia linking to [[Markup_language]] like this).

The linking in PpcSoft iKnow is extremely powerful, and you don't have to do anything to connect notes (pages). You'll give each note a name (just like the wiki) and then PpcSoft iKnow will automatically convert this name to a hyperlink every time the name is used in any note (without any special formatting).

The most important and powerful feature of a personal wiki is handled automatically by PpcSoft iKnow

In other words, the most important and powerful feature of a personal wiki is handled automatically by PpcSoft iKnow, and it is the only personal wiki in the world that has this powerful feature !

This feature gets even more powerful as you use PpcSoft iKnow more and create more notes. If you create a new note called "wiki" to quickly explain the basic concept of a wiki, every note (including all your previous notes) will now link to this note wherever you have written the word "wiki".

In every other wiki you would have to go back to all your old notes and update them manually to be able to connect to your new note, but this is handled automatically in PpcSoft iKnow - did I mention how powerful this feature is :-) ?

Oh, and because PpcSoft iKnow is a desktop application, you don't need any database engine, you don't need any web server and you don't need any custom markup format. In addition, you'll get a small, easy to use, lightning fast and very powerful application that no browser-based personal wiki can match.

But don't take our word for it - download PpcSoft iKnow and try it yourself !


For more examples on how you can use PpcSoft iKnow - see Using PpcSoft iKnow.

See also Wikipedia + Google = iKnow for more information.