DokuWiki as private personal online wiki for reading notes

Posted by nathanb
Jun 12, 2018 at 09:34 PM

Chris Thompson wrote:
You can link to sections in Notion (see here:
>https://www.notion.so/Link-directly-to-a-section-on-the-page-1bdf0ef9b8a04e9392cbce77184ec400
>) I don’t think you can link to individual paragraphs within a section
>yet, but IIRC you can’t do that in DokuWiki either. (For section links
>to be permanent/stable, you also need a plugin in DokuWiki.)
> >I’m not sure how often people other than very advanced/academic users
>want paragraph links, so I can understand why it’s probably a lower
>priority feature. Tinderbox dropped this feature for three versions
>(it’s back now, and more powerful) and there wasn’t a huge outcry.
> >Agreed on the backlinks. That needs to be there, and DokuWiki does have
>that by default. It’s a little bit less necessary in Notion because
>there is always a hierarchy where you could in theory find things,
>whereas a pure wiki can easily end up as a soup of orphan pages, but I’m
>sure this is on their radar.

Agreed that paragraph links aren’t much more useful than links to the whole note/page. I was just playing around with it a bit more and it’s more capable than I thought. I was able to ‘clone’ an item in a database, which in itself is a just a regular page (with all the rich editing and element-nesting capabilities of any ‘normal’ page) with the addition of the database metadata. I then copied it under a completely different tree and saw that it was a true clone (any change is reflected everywhere it appears), not a forked copy. One thing I was struggling with was trying to figure out where the real ‘parent’ of an element was after dropping it under trees and within other pages. Found a ‘insert breadcrumb’ command that shows the actual path with it’s content. Pretty impressive that it can do what airtable does and let any single database entries make all sorts of cameo appearances outside of that table ANYWHERE within the rest of your content. They have a ‘mention’ command, which is just a in-text link to a page instead of embedding a page. You are right, they probably aren’t far away from adding a ‘mentions’ element, which would be phenomenal.

Add to that a seemingly low ‘data lock-in’ risk, offline modes for all my screens (android finally!), and it’s simple enough to share a ‘workspace’ with non-nerds so we can have decent project dashboarding for a change…. My wife and I have shared a set of OneNote notebooks for about 6 years now. At the very least, notion would be a major upgrade to that set of notes and lists.

Heck, I was just able to insert a partial screenshot (that I captured with the OneNote snipper) and plopped it inline in a notion page seemlessly…and that was the WEB version. The con list here is getting real short…