Zettelkasten

A guide to the system we use to keep notes in a zettelkasten using MediaWiki.

We have authored a series of blog posts that feature different ideas discussed on this page, available here: https://charlesreid1.github.io/category/zettelkasten.html

Basics

Handy glossary of terms: Zettelkasten/Glossary

Why MediaWiki?

MediaWiki is a more complicated solution than something like Evernote or Joplin. So why go with it for a tool that will be used in day-to-day life? A couple of reasons.

First and foremost, MediaWiki is the software that runs Wikipedia; of all the wiki software currently in existence, MediaWiki has the highest chance of survival for precisely that reason.

Second, MediaWiki comes with built-in capabilites that are extremely useful, and that not all wiki software has. The most important one is transclusion - the ability to create a chunk of text, and dynamically include that text in other pages.

The ease with which new pages, subpages, page structure, and content can be created in MediaWiki also makes the experience of building out or reorganizing page structure much more pleasant than other wiki tools or note-taking applications. Subpages allow arbitrary nesting of child pages within parent pages (e.g., [[Python]] or [[Python/Networking]] or [[Python/Networking/Scapy]]), making it easy to organize information hierarchically.

MediaWiki's built-in Categories functionality serves the same purpose that tags serve in the Zettelkasten system (see Zettelkasten/Glossary), making it a natural fit for a Zetteklasten.

Speaking of built-in mechanisms: MediaWiki is highly customizable with CSS and skins; it has built-in image and file embedding capabilities, flexible table and image layout options, and a robust ecosysstem of plugins that support things like Lua scripting, videos, and LaTeX.

Do you need more reasons? Well, okay, MediaWiki has an extensive backend API, plus built-in authentication and authorization, plus the ability to create bot users to perform automated actions securely, with separate credentials. A library called pywikibot supports writing automated bots that interact with the wiki, making it possible to automate the creation or maintenance of pages.

Since Wikipedia is built on MediaWiki, you can copy and paste MediaWiki templates directly from Wikipedia for use on the private MediaWiki. But additionally, when you learn MediaWiki syntax, you learn Wikipedia syntax, so experience editing a private MediaWiki wiki will translate directly to Wikipedia.

Patterns

List of uesful zettelkasten MediaWiki patterns: Zettelkasten/Patterns