Cross-link multiple wikis

[Victor Dorneanu]

I don't know if this topic has been discussed somewhere else, but I'd like to know if there is any "elegant" solution how to create links between tiddlers in different wikis.

I've recently found Tobi Beer's quick'n'dirty solution which uses several macros to have something like:

<<. docs Documentation>>

to link to a tiddler called "Documentation" in the "docs" wiki. If you look at $:/editions/docs you'll see a "src" field where the location of the wiki is specified (in that case docs.html).

I use the same approach for my personal Zettelkasten where I have:

1) one TW instance (single HTML file) for the knowledge base

2) one TW instance (single HTML file) for bibliography and sources (web articles etc.)

Are there any other ways to implement this? Thanks in advance.

KR,

Victor

[skaczm...@gmail.com]

I want to achieve the same on my Zettelkasten type wiki. I want separate wiki just for resources and implement them in other knowledge management wiki.

[David Gifford]

I don't know if it meets your criteria for 'elegant', but try https://kookma.github.io/TW-Searchwikis/

In a nutshell, you create indexes in content wikis, transfer the indexes to a central index wiki, and it searches the indexes and the links are links to the tiddlers in the content wikis.

See an early, modified version of it in action at my Spanish site https://giffmex.org/wiki/.  'testamento' is the search term in the busqueda tab, and below the search window you can see the results from the indexes of numerous files. The links are external links to the tiddlers in other files that contain the content.

The only drawback to this is that you need to remember to redo the index each time you edit the file, and also add the index tiddler to the central file where the search is. Since both of the people posting here are only talking about two files total, that makes it easy.

[TW Tones]

Victor,

I will backup David's suggestion of Mohammad's searchWikis because you can link to specific tiddler in another wiki but they key is what you want to achieve. 

The first rule is you can do anything with links you can on any website, use permalinks and permaviews, drag and drop between wikis, iframe one in another and create link that open in the the same target windows/tab. Bob or bobexe is critical if you may open the same wiki for edit in different tabs, windows or browsers.

Copy to clipboard is a way to take a search string from one wiki to another and a lot more can be done.

I recently responded to someone else's questions on the same subject and someone else was talking about capturing bookmarks with tiddlywiki which can include tiddlywiki itself.

Regards

Tones

[Victor Dorneanu]

Hi everybody,

somehow I must have missed the notifications for this thread. First of all thanks for your replies. I didn't know TW-Searchwikis before and I think that for searching tiddlers in multiple wikis that's definitely the perfect tool.

As for "links between multiple wikis" I'll try to give a more comprehensive explanation:

• the reason why I've splitted "concerns"/domains/contexts in multiple wikis is because of the size: I don't want to have a big bloated wiki, instead I want to have multiple ones
  
  • one for the zettelkasten
    
  • one for the bibliography
  • individual ones for several domains like IT security, nutrition, sports etc.
    
  • one for collection of bookmarks
  • etc.
• now when I create links e.g. from the zettelkasten to the bibliography wiki, I also need to specify the location of the wiki as well (like I've described at the beginning of this thread)
  • imagine after some years you'll have hundreds of links from one wiki to another
  • let's say the location of one wiki changes (bib.html changes to bibliography.html)
    
  • then I'll have to update the links to reflect the new wiki location (bibliography.html)
    
  • and that's what I mean by "elegant"
    • regardless of the method I use to interlink between multiple wikis there should be a way to update multiple links easily
      
    • and this solution should also work in 15 years :D 
• one thing that is not solved yet (at least I haven't found a solution):
  • let's stick to the zettelkasten -> bibliography example (you have several tiddlers in zettelkasten containing links to tiddlers in bibliography)
    
  • inserting links in the zettelkasten to some tiddlers in the bibliography wiki is easy (I still use the macro mentioned before)
  • but how do I show backlinks in the bibliography wiki?
    • more specific: how can I show which tiddlers in the zettelkasten wiki point to _this_ specific tiddler in the bibliography wiki?
      

I hope my post is not that confusing. I'm looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

Victor

[TW Tones]

Victor,

At the same time as you search for a Glossary item, in your zettelkasten tiddlywiki, you can have the search also look for the use of that term in zettelkasten . that is effectively what the backlinks would be. If you kept a glossary centrally and its not too big you could package and install it on any wiki. Drag and drop update. If you could go further you copuld let you add glossary items in any wiki but have a tool to export additions and include them in the central wiki.

Regards

Tones

[Victor Dorneanu]

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly.

> as you search for a Glossary item, in your zettelkasten tiddlywiki, you can have the search also look for the use of that term in zettelkasten

But I want the search to look for the term in zettelkasten and bibliography as well. And this is what TW-Searchwikis is about, right?

> If you kept a glossary centrally and its not too big you could package and install it on any wiki.

What do you mean by a glossary? I don't have a central tiddler where I keep track of "terms" that are used in multiple wikis. 

To give you a more precise example:

• I wrote a short summary about David Allen's GTD book
  • There I have a link to GTD which is part of the zettelkasten
  • In the GTD tiddler itself I have a source field (origin of information, thanks @bimlas for that) which contains a link back to the tiddler in bibliography
  • Sometimes I want to link to some quotes (for example Getting Things Done - Note 3) in the zettelkasten wiki
    • what I want now to achieve is to show in Getting Things Done - Note 3 which tiddlers in zettelkasten (and not only) are pointing to it 
      

I hope this helps.

Victor

[David Gifford]

1. Some kind of search and replace would probably be the fastest way to update links from linking to "bib.html" to linking to "bibliography.html". See https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM#z=qvnb1tyGX-Zfd0n7kl_Moj-d&q=replace for several tools. Obviously, thinking through your file naming conventions carefully beforehand will save you headaches later.

2. Showing a list of tiddlers in another file that link to a tiddler in the present file, as far as I know, is impossible.

[TW Tones]

Victor,

Sorry for the confusion, replace my use of the word Glossary With Bibliography. 

What is a back link?, it shows you where that entry is in use in other tiddlers.

Having a separate bibliography html, you create and name bibliographic entries. In the First wiki you provide a link to the bibliographic entry using the permalink link / same name. Thus in the first wiki you can link to/reference that bibliographic entry multiple times. The equivalent of a back link is a search that can find all links to the same bibliographic entry (the links to the other wiki) but in searching the first wiki. The backlinking in the Bibliographic wiki only points to tiddlers linking to the entry in the bibliographical wiki and are of little use. 

A much underutilised part of tiddlywiki seems to be the development of "soft" practices or procedures, perhaps supported by software (ie wikitext, widgets and macros). Commonly called work flow. Remember the most intelligent part of the whole solution is the human. Teach the human - yourself to follow some documented practices and you can solve many problems. I have at least a dozen practices like this, including building tiddlywiki solutions to build tiddlywiki solutions. It is all quite "meta" or self referential.

I hope this explains what I have said a little better.

Regards

Tones

[TW Tones]

Victor,

Since a bibliography is an index, perhaps it (the wiki)  can contain the search part of mohammads "Searchwikis" that make use of an index of each/all wikis making use of bibliographic entries. After a little work on your on your  zettelkasten Wiki generate an index and drop it on the bibliograqphic wiki, now a search on the bibliographic wiki will also be a search of the zettelkasten wiki

On the zettelkasten wiki create a method to find one or more references to the same bibliographic link.

We can make this almost seamless with more work, but my point is to develop the appropriate practice.

Regards

Tones

[Victor Dorneanu]

Yeah, thanks for your clarifications. At least I think I know how this might work. But I guess "Searchwikis" will definitely improve the search across multiple wikis. And as you already mentioned: I need to find a method how to share indices across multiple wikis in a convenient way.

Thanks for your input.

Victor

[skaczm...@gmail.com]

I did tests of TW-Searchwikis plugin today and it seems to me like it is only looking for text in title and tags, not in the body of tiddler. Please tell me if it is possible to make it look for searched text also in the body of tiddler, because without that it is useless for me, because I decided to use generic and auto incremented names of tiddlers in order to save time and confusion of coming up with unique names.

[skaczm...@gmail.com]

@Victor Dorneanu, buddy, if I may suggest you something, I think it is way better to go for "server" solution of tiddlty wiki like TW5-Bob or node js than single file wiki. I used single file approach when I started with Tiddly Wiki and it gets laggy very quick and you are not able to get anything from this wiki if enything breaks. In "server approach" each tiddler is a separate file, each image is kept in its original, file form instead of hard coding it. You have much more possibilities to remediate in case of trouble.

[TW Tones]

Victor/skaczm...@gmail.com,

With respect this experience of yours skaczm...@gmail.com is not mine. I thus feel I need to present a dissenting view.

Unless very big, or editing the current tiddler incorrectly or with too much occurring on the screen at once my single file wikis are almost never "laggy", in every case there are options to reduce such lag. This can be helped with large wikis on servers if using special features such as external media and skinny tiddlers but many of the same techniques used on single file wikis, can be needed even on a server wiki, due to the way it is loaded into browser memory. Keep in mind skinny tiddlers are like searchwikis indexes, you can not necessarily search there content unless they are loaded.

Victor specifically,

If you want to search the full tiddlers text and other fields from inside a wiki ultimately you actually want these tiddlers inside your wiki. Depending on the way you will maintain your data a lot can still be done. As I suggested in my previous relies a lot of this is what is you work flow and wiki interchange, why are you searching, what kind of thing are you looking for and what do you want to do with it when you find it? As I suggested if you are looking for details within a bibliography entry go to that dedicated wiki. 

Typically Bibliographies and Glossaries and other kinds of cumulative reference information shared through out an organisation are independent resources and the title is the key to that reference and find for integration into other solutions. Thus the search wikis indexing of titles is sufficient, if you need deeper research go to the reference wiki, then have a method to transfer your results to the current wiki if needed.

Alternatively you could publish your bibliography as a plugin tiddler and drop it on your working wiki, or via a library.

Regards

Tones 

[Victor Dorneanu]

> if I may suggest you something, I think it is way better to go for "server" solution of tiddlty wiki like TW5-Bob or node js than single file wiki

I've used nodeJS solution before on my local machine and it got laggy. I guess you can still improve performance but that wasn't the main factor I've switched to single files.

The reason therefor was: I wanted to be able to edit my wikis from _everywhere_. That also includes smartphones. And I also didn't want to setup a nodeJS environment somewhere in the cloud or using a VPS to host the Tiddlywiki instance (I've also tested nodeJS version of Tiddlywiki using termux, but that kind of complicated things). Besides that I still wanted to "own" the data, that's why I also didn't go for tiddlyspot for example.

Now I use the TiddlyDrive Add-on for Google Drive which perfectly fits my needs: I can access it from everywhere, using any client (smartphone, desktop, chrome, firefox) and it's easy and convenient to use. From there I export the files to some S3 bucket, which is publicly available.

But I think this is off-topic and doesn't really have to with the initial topic.

> If you want to search the full tiddlers text and other fields from inside a wiki ultimately you actually want these tiddlers inside your wiki

Yeah, but that's exactly what I do not want :) I want to separate concerns (like I've mentioned above). There are also 3rd party solutions that allow searching in a big JSON database (since we can extract everything from the Tiddlywiki in JSON format). I've done this previously with hugo (check out this site, especially lunr.js).

To come to a conclusion: I think I need to investigate more time how I want to use my zettelkasten and my bibliography. At the moment I'm just feeding those 2 systems with data and in a 2nd process I actually link between tiddlers. At that point I might find best practices how to deal with "external" tiddlers. Currently I just need to know if there are already tiddlers related to a topic and if yes, _where_ are they :)

Thanks for your valuable input.