Monowikis vs. Microwikis

[Michael McDermott‏]

I'm sure this has come up before, but what are the downsides to keeping one large wiki vs. several smaller ones? I mostly use mine as a sort of commonplace book and have two wikis, one that is related to work (technical stuff + project notes) and the other that is everything else of interest. I've been considering merging them together and the couldn't really think of a reason not to.

[TiddlyTweeter‏]

Try it and see. If you know what you imported you can always delete it.

TW scales pretty well. A known issue on performance hit is if you use tags extensively (like tagging hundreds upon hundreds) and use tag tiddlers that have populated list fields to order those tagged Tiddlers.

FWIW  I often combine wiki, just make share I use a consistent Tiddler naming system so I can easily identify what to export if things got slow. Rarely happened to me.

TT

[Damon Pritchett‏]

I use what you call a monowiki that is approximately 10MB in size with thousands of tiddlers. As TiddlyTweeter mentioned, extensive use of tags can slow things down. I use tags only as little as possible. I use fields for everything else. I also don't embed any images (or very, very few) in my wiki. I use external links instead.

Hope this helps.

Damon

[TonyM‏]

Michael,

Whilst combining wikis has its value, and it takes some time to reach limits, if you do so carefully they can be easy to pull apart later.  

If you have a way to logically keep two wikis separate make use of this fact and keep it separate, there are plenty of integration options while keeping them separate. Tiddlywikis work well as smart documents as well.

I have a large consolidated personal organiser but I am now starting to move projects or clients out to their own wiki because I can customise and grow them further without overlapping the functionality of the key wiki, however I keep project metadata in the key wkii to drive regular reviews and project level time frames, but the project wiki has all the detail. Having a wiki edition for say project makes creating a new project easier.

In my tiddlywiki development suite I have dozens if not hundreds of wikis, usually created to some "end" in particular, or subject, once the activity comes to a close the essence is extracted and packaged and the original wiki archived. I then place the result in a consolidated wiki.

Integrations

• Jeds bob wiki has a number of integrations will all its child wikis, whilst I place dev wikis under it, one consolidates resources which I drag to the wiki in use, eg images, icons. 
• another has all the plugins I come across, another my business plan, another social media content in writing
• Mohammad's indexing solution .https://kookma.github.io/TW-Searchwikis/ is a great advance for integration, even fo0r single file wikis, you can include locally searchable content that comes from another wiki, with links to that content.
• TiddlyWikis versatility allows numerous integrations and interactions at a designer and user perspective you can make almost anything as an integration
• Eg you can drag and drop between one wiki and another in an iframe in the current wiki.

Regards

tony

[Xavier Roy‏]

Michael,

I also follow the same approach as mine. It is easier to spin up a new wiki for a particular task. I have a catch-all wiki that pulls in data from other wikis using the SearchWikis plugin. It is a great piece of work 👍🏾. 

The one thing I would really love to have is interwiki linking. If I could pull in tiddlers from my commonplace book with something like {{quote>TITLE}} in a different tiddler.It could also extend this to the SearchWikis plugin like pulling in the updated index whenever I open my main wiki.

Regards,

Xavier

[Mohammad Rahmani‏]

While maintaining several wikis is a little cumbersome, but I support multi wikis! In my opinion like a word processor you should have different docs for different purposes! Use the searchwikis plugin to have a central wiki then!

Best wishes

Mohammad

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 12:48 AM Michael McDermott <mcdermott...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm sure this has come up before, but what are the downsides to keeping one large wiki vs. several smaller ones? I mostly use mine as a sort of commonplace book and have two wikis, one that is related to work (technical stuff + project notes) and the other that is everything else of interest. I've been considering merging them together and the couldn't really think of a reason not to.

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[JWHoneycutt‏]

I started with numerous micro-wikis. I had too many edge cases where I had difficulty determining if a tiddler belonged in one or another, and started finding duplicates with diverging information.

So I decided about a year ago to combine them all. It became a 23 MB file (with no images), and takes about 8 seconds to save (too long for me). As my coding skills improve I have used tags and lists extensively (such as `<$list filter=[all[current]tagging[]!tag[Topic]!sort[modified]] template=IncTemplate/>`) where IncTemplate is a macro I created that places the target inside a checkbox.

Thankfully "AdvancedSearch" has a filter tab that lets me export (as JSON) a file that quickly populates a new purpose-built wiki.

In short, I have pendulum swung to both extremes of your question. My current state is to have a massive wiki (21MB) and am breaking out smaller wikis when I am comfortable that the line of separation is clearly demarcated (in my mind) to I do not have to search in more than one location. I need to research the plugin mentioned above in this thread...

JWHoneycutt

[TiddlyTweeter‏]

I support multi wikis! In my opinion like a word processor you should have different docs for different purposes!

I agree that one way to conceive a wiki is as a "document" in the same way a word processor does. But many other mental models work too! For instance your very own Tiddler Commander can be best thought of as "utility software". Its a serious application. That is the richness of TW, its architecture supports many models of function and purpose.

Regarding the OP there seem two dimensions ...

1 - SCOPE - meaning what the wiki is for: mixed purpose (e.g. don't need several wikis), single purpose (e.g. bookmark collection), single document (e.g. e-pub), mixed content (e.g. a media hub), dev-environment (e.g. for prototyping) etc... etc ... etc...

2 - PERFORMANCE - Though TW scales well, at size there are known limiting factors, depending on a wiki's construction (dynamic tag use being a major one, I think.) BUT we do have special plugins like Dynaview that might address this issue on large wikis; though they are only just beginning to be used so examples to follow are limited.

Best wishes

TT

On Thursday, 11 June 2020 09:42:24 UTC+2, Mohammad wrote:

While maintaining several wikis is a little cumbersome, but I support multi wikis! In my opinion like a word processor you should have different docs for different purposes! Use the searchwikis plugin to have a central wiki then!

Best wishes

Mohammad

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 12:48 AM Michael McDermott <mcdermot...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm sure this has come up before, but what are the downsides to keeping one large wiki vs. several smaller ones? I mostly use mine as a sort of commonplace book and have two wikis, one that is related to work (technical stuff + project notes) and the other that is everything else of interest. I've been considering merging them together and the couldn't really think of a reason not to.

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[springer‏]

Just one more variable here, in terms of whether and when to individuate TW instances: AUDIENCE

Many of my TW projects are already -- or may eventually be -- shared with a particular kind of audience (often students in a course, but not always). I have one catch-all wiki for all the personal project content that doesn't fit any of those baskets, and another for TW-related experimentation (plugins under evaluation, useful tidbits and how-tos, plus resources and links squirreled away for future exploration). 

For any audience other than myself, when the point is the content rather than the tool itself, I like to share a wiki that doesn't include too many unrelated tiddlers. (And often even the interface style wants to be different, and I do enjoy having different interface flavors as I shift from one domain to another on a given day.)

Of course, one might prefer to keep everything together, knowing it's possible to export a filtered set of tiddlers down the road. But when I already suspect that a body of ideas may be prime for sharing later, I start by setting up a tiddlyspot site for it (with an encryption password if need be). Then I can share a link to the site in a totally spontaneous way when I run into someone who would appreciate it.

-Springer

[TW Tones‏]

Springer,

A most important consideration - who is the audience?. For many wikis it is them-self, and the prior issues are important, but anything planed for the bigger world the scope is often easy to define.

Thanks for making this important point.

This aspect could possible be broken down further. Such as read only publications vs those with serial editors need different support tools.

Regards

Tony

[Diego Mesa‏]

I do this same thing.

In my mind, if TW is my external brain, I should only have one! If performance was never an issue, one could always just use actually use tags to completely split content apart, giving you the same workflow as having separate wikis.  I use tags but not so extensively.

[TiddlyTweeter‏]

Fully agree. Good points & examples.