Conversation About Wiki Data Presentation and Recollection

[Darth Mole]

First I apologize if this is a taboo topic. I don't meant for it to be flame war between respective camps if it is. I just tend to view/understand things differently when it comes to paradigms or techniques. 

I have seen many posts about workflows and data collection but this post is about data presentation and recollection. 

I don't know if my constant internal debate is normal for others as well, or if I'm trying to bridge too many different concepts that are fundamentally different, or something else but it personally drives me crazy. 

From what I can tell there are at least three main methods of presenting wiki data:

1. Search feature that you enter keyword(s) into and review the results. 

2. Some kind of table of contents or index that shows all of the content, most likely grouped by some type of categorization. 

3. Some kind of splash page that is similar in concept to #2 but acts more as a guide with manual links embedded within a naturally written page to almost create an interface. 

In truth #3 might be just me creating some sort of perversion of #2 from my experience with web design and game/anime wikia sites. 

Also, my concerns about data "recollection" might be an example of me trying to bridge wiki-ing and note taking. Perhaps the concept of recollection isn't as important in a wiki because you are using it to collect specific, related, and organized topics and as such it will display accordingly? I guess like the details of a city or character under the appropriate section (wiki) vs a random though entered on a random day about a commercial you just saw (notes). I know you can use a wiki for note taking and a note taking as a way to wiki-ing but are the underlying processes easily interchangeable? Or do they cause a conflict?

tl;dr: 

How do you present your wiki data to yourself/others? Do you use the search feature most of the time? Or do you use an index/table of contents approach? Or something else entirely or in between the two?

Thanks!

[Charlie Veniot]

G'day,

Always an index, for myself and especially for others when I drop my TiddlyWiki instances, as-is, on hosted sites.  I don't think any of these would be much use with search as the mechanism to find content:

• Le P'tit Aurèle: un lexique du français acadien / a lexicon of Acadian French
  • (My very first TiddlyWiki project, I'm in the midst of overhauling this one.)
• Charlie's Favourite Stuff and Projects
  • This started off as a "Products Review" TiddlyWiki, and turned into an experiment to make one TiddlyWiki look like four different TiddlyWiki's when there is so much in common between the four purposes that it seem silly to maintain four different TiddlyWiki instances
    • Product Reviews
    • Urban Off-Gridding for Laypersons
    • Hydro Bill Cutting for Laypersons
    • Chromebook:  Beyond Web Browsing
• My online curriculum vitae
  
• My "Tifoist" project: Tifoist Is a Fact-Oriented Information-Semanticization Tool
  • Imagine using TiddlyWiki for fact-based information modelling and database engineering !!!
• TiddlyWiki Programming Fundamentals
  
  •  (That sounds "authoritative", but it definitely isn't; it is really all about throwing new things I learn, discoveries/experiments, newbie stuff, in there.  Maybe it might be somewhat semi-authoritative someday, maybe not ... just a fun way to write stuff)

You'll notice that some of these are presented in my new favourite way:  hide most TiddlyWiki elements when the sidebar is collapsed.

Cool topic for discussion.

Cheers !

[Soren Bjornstad]

In my Zettelkasten I use search, in combination with concise and memorable titles, if I already know exactly what I'm looking for, and occasionally to find references to a particular phrase or idea that I'm considering turning into a tiddler of its own. Otherwise, I rely mostly on links – search for or find in a tag list something that is vaguely related to the kind of thing I'm looking for and explore the links from there. This definitely works better with a good list of outbound links and backlinks like I have at the bottom of every tiddler, but it could be made to work even in stock TiddlyWiki.

As for others visiting the site, there are a few views (e.g., topical tags, bibliographies on specific topics, list of recently read books) that might give people a head start, but most people who have commented on it to me also like the links mechanism for exploring. That likely works particularly well with this use case because people tend not to be trying to find something in particular.