
Designing a Personal Knowledgebase - ingve
http://www.acuriousmix.com/2014/09/03/designing-a-personal-knowledgebase/
======
sirgawain33
I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing
and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge,
creating a crawler/indexer for research and web sites in one my areas of
interest. I thought "if only we organize things better we can change the
world!"

I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the
categorizing and _simplifying_. The author hits on it a few times:

"It is the extraction and organization of the information that takes time... I
know full automation is not feasible, since the imposition of meaning onto the
raw information is something that I must do, not the computer."

In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.

What is simplifying?

It's distilling a complex research paper into a few key data points. It's
naming files well so that you can search them with Spotlight. It's learning to
write more clearly. etc.

That last one -- clear writing -- should have been obvious. Good writers
manage to convey so much information in so little space. How do they do it?

The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they
become very easy to find and _use_.

We can expand this to a bigger point: if you really want to get smarter, you
need to be learning to simplify because your brain can only hold so much at
once.

It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an
apple falls from a tree.

The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make
your "Personal Knowledgebase" more _difficult_ to grow because it forces you
to go through the simplifying process sooner.

I stole this idea from someone on HN: anytime I find an idea or quote that I
think it important, I clip it into a Word Document and print it out. I keep
these in a binder. I have gone back to these notes so many more times than
anything that I have in any digital form. More significantly, these bits of
information have influenced my life more often and more deeply.

~~~
gavinpc
Writing is the best and hardest way to think. "Drop by drop," as I've heard
say.

I love the binder practice. I got a printer about a month ago, printed a bunch
of files (notes, incomplete songs, etc), _deleted_ them, then reduced the mess
down to a few pages. That was a productive day.

I submit that we have a false equivalency—nay, a false superiority of digital
files over paper. After all, that's what we're all about here, right?

As you say, the constraints of paper are a _feature_ , not a bug. I would have
made this comment shorter, but I didn't have time.

 _EDIT_ Here you go, from right now:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272394)

~~~
EC1
I feel so opposite to this entire thread. I have everything on my computer
neatly organized, indexed, and tagged properly. For quick input of ideas, I
learned cursive and I learned to write it quickly and legibly, and I use this
system: personally its flawless -
[http://bulletjournal.com/](http://bulletjournal.com/)

I have a few filled up notebooks and anytime I need some information I look it
up in the index, and flip to it. I even write down URL's and descriptions to
videos I liked. If I'm watching a video, I write down the timestamp, url, and
title, thats how I index media. Maybe if the contents are important like
dialogue or lyrics to a song, I'll jot down an excerpt.

It's really cool looking back on old notebooks. Can't wait to virtually go
through every day of my life on paper when I get older, show my kids too.

I have a master list document on my computer that has every entry in the table
of contents categorized as well, so that makes finding stuff easier too.

~~~
zz1
THANK YOU! It really looks great!

------
otakucode
I'd very much appreciate a system like the one described as well. And I've got
some further ideas. When tagging, suggested tags should be very smart - like
Amazon/Netflix recommendation system smart. It should be backed with a
Bayesian categorizer or similar. This sort of categorization engine could also
be used to recommend hyperlink targets between sources when a term is
selected.

It definitely needs to integrate with the web browser. Highlighting a web page
extract and saving it should both save the extract to the knowledgebase and
also mirror the entire page in the KB so that later you can hit a 'context'
button and be given the original source it came from. Trust as little as
possible that the content will remain available and unchanged.

I'd also like for there to be a 'bulk' area where things like entire books for
future reference material could be saved reachable by the searching
functionality.

An automatic chronological index would also be helpful. If I save a page about
fractal image compression and from there move to wavelet compression, being
able to see the history of what order the topics were visited in would be
beneficial.

Integration with learning assistance systems would be nice as well, things
like the various apps that use intelligently timed repetition of information
in order to help with memory.

I do think that building from a wiki could be a possible start. My biggest
concern with using a wiki or other web based system is the terrible layout
options forced upon us by HTML and CSS. They are designed such that arbitrary
layout is quite difficult, and arbitrary layout would be fairly necessary for
this.

------
TeMPOraL
This is a great text; saving to re-read another time.

Personally, I use Dropbox + org-mode based personal wiki. I store each
important topic in its own file, and the whole thing gets synced between all
my machines. It basically looks like this:

[http://imgur.com/Xgpzj5f](http://imgur.com/Xgpzj5f)

I heavily use links between documents, to outside sources, and back-up
anything important by downloading PDFs/pictures and saving plaintext in an org
file.

My current pain points:

\- internal linking - I try to avoid linking from .org file to another,
because I expect that if I move a piece of text to another file (or even
subheading, for heading-relative links), I won't be able to find all the links
that broke in the other files. So I created a "dispatcher" file, that maps
links to destinations, so when I move something, I only have one place to
check. Unfortunately, this requires two clicks to traverse to your
destination, and is basically annoying. So I'm looking for another solution
for broken incoming links.

\- mobile viewing - I don't use the org-agenda based flow that is apparently
required for org-mode, and the Android is too stupid to let Dropbox open my
org files (without workarounds that require a lot of tapping on the screen),
because there's nothing registered to open files with .org extension _sigh_.
I'm yet to find a good solution for this (even just a simple text editor that
could register itself as an app for .org files would be immensely helpful).

\- web viewing - sometimes I'd like to browse my personal wiki from someone
else's machine, or maybe even link to a particular page; for that I'd love to
have a web-viewable version of my wiki. I want it to work seamlessly, i.e.
without having to manually regenerate or commit everything. This could be
doable with Dropbox and a bit of org-export scripting, but I'm yet to get
around to do it.

\- web writing - sometimes I'd like to dump some notes into my wiki from
someone else's machine; I haven't figured out how to make it work.

~~~
shoover
That's a very extensive list of org files you have there :)

I bypass org-agenda for mobile viewing by scheduling a job to call org-html-
export-to-html on each .org file. Dropbox mobile works well for viewing the
exported HTML. There is zero hassle once the script is running.

Here's the rake script I use:
[https://gist.github.com/shoover/d75a58074be9894bfc54](https://gist.github.com/shoover/d75a58074be9894bfc54).
The core emacs batch command for html export is simple enough. The rake-isms
are there to find all the .org files in the given directories and check
timestamps. There is optional elisp to deal with loading my latest org-mode
and not the built-in one. The INDEX business was added to deal with MobileOrg
but I no longer use that. Read-only HTML in Dropbox is good enough for me.

Agreed that internal linking is a pain point. I just use `C-c l` and suffer
the dead links.

Agreed regarding remote editing. Gmail drafts "transport" are what I end up
using. It's not terrible but could be better.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _That 's a very extensive list of org files you have there :)_

Oh well... ;). Though it might seem like it, it doesn't give me any problems.
I usually remember more-less how I named a file with a particular thought I
need, and if I can't, there's always grep to the rescue :).

Thanks for the script, I'll try to adapt to suit my needs :).

> _Gmail drafts "transport" are what I end up using. It's not terrible but
> could be better._

Yeah, I usually send e-mails to myself.

I'm thinking, maybe I'll eventually get around to spin up a Dropbox daemon on
a VPS and make it sync only the wiki/ directory, and then put some simple
"save snippet" CGI script to have a browser capture enpoint.

~~~
shoover
> _Oh well... ;). Though it might seem like it, it doesn 't give me any
> problems. I usually remember more-less how I named a file with a particular
> thought I need, and if I can't, there's always grep to the rescue :)._

Makes sense. ido-mode helps. Despite the fact that this is an anti-agenda
thread, I should report that I also just discovered how easy it is to search
across agenda files by word or regexp. It's like org aware grep. You would
need some elisp to load all your .org files into org-agenda-files.

I've always used a handful of very large files, which probably doesn't have
any particular advantage other than less buffer switching and facilitating
isearch over grep. However, outline levels quickly get deep in large files.

> _I 'm thinking, maybe I'll eventually get around to spin up a Dropbox daemon
> on a VPS and make it sync only the wiki/ directory, and then put some simple
> "save snippet" CGI script to have a browser capture enpoint._

Sounds good.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _ido-mode helps_

Especially with flx-ido (fuzzy matching for names) and ido-vertical-mode; now
it's just fun to use :).

> _this is an anti-agenda thread_

I used to use agenda for doing GTD for over a year sometimes ago; it was
awesome for aggregating calendars and TODO lists from multiple files, but I
never got around to learning other interesting features. Maybe it's the time
to try again :).

> _However, outline levels quickly get deep in large files._

Yup. I still have a lot of deeply-nested long .org files - those are usually
project-specific, and contain ideas, design notes, TODO lists, etc. But for
personal wiki, it feels more natural for me to keep every topic in a separate
file (mind you, some of them are quite long; my notes from "Pragmatic Thinking
and Learning" are 750+ lines of 4-level deep nesting, and I'm nowhere near
finished :)). I fear even thinking about coalescing them into a single file;
when your file hits 10k lines (like one of my project notebooks at work), you
find out you need to keep it fully expanded, because navigating with top
headers folded gets kind of slow.

------
mark_l_watson
After years of being a paying Evernote customer, I stopped using it several
months ago. I am actively looking for alternatives. I found that I was
spending too much time curating information in Evernote for the value I got
from looking up material for reference.

One thing that I have been experimenting with is keeping a few top level
subject directories in Dropbox and making notes in plain text markdown files.
If I use a .txt file extension, then available iOS and Android editors that
work with Dropbox give me coverage across tablet, phone, and laptop. Spotlight
search on my laptop helps me find notes but finding the right information on
mobile devices is a problem.

I also write notes in Google Drive and store potentially useful PDFs and
purchased books in GD, and rely on GD search to find things.

I have tried org-mode but I no longer "live" in Emacs so org-mode is not ready
at hand as it would have been ten or twenty years ago when I used Emacs for
everything.

~~~
hliyan
We have had very similar experiences with Evernote, then. I also used Google
Notebook before the (in my opinion very efficient) product was discontinued.
Google Docs on the other hand forces you to open entire documents. This
doesn't work well when the most frequent use case is a quick-and-dirty append.

This may sound like a "solve everything with git" type comment, but honestly,
I have found that keeping a set of markdown files in a git repository
(frequently pushed to github) works well for me. I can have a quick script
that appends a default journal file for thoughts I don't want to spend time
organizing immediately. For everything else, I open up the relevant .md file
and add a bullet point.

So far it's working better than anything I've experimented with over the last
ten years.

~~~
jarvist
I do the same; only with vimwiki (so today's diary is just two key strokes
away).
[https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki)

I recently found a blogpost describing a way to add 'commit hooks' to vimwiki
so that my repository is automatically synchronised when I make edits. You can
still fall back on command line git for fixing merges / anything else.

[http://jarvistmoorefrost.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/snippet-
co...](http://jarvistmoorefrost.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/snippet-console-
diary-vimwiki-now-with-more-git-autohooks/)

------
darkxanthos
God this is hard. I've been trying to get at a solution to this exact problem
for a very long time as well. It needs to be there when I'm walking down the
street, sitting in a busy meeting, or at home in bed. A hybrid of mind-
mapping, notes, and a document database. I'd also like to be able to publish
and organize documents for others to view.

I wish I had a solution.

~~~
ckluis
FWIW - I’ve always thought these guys were close to something (but not there
yet) - [https://gingkoapp.com/p/future-of-
text](https://gingkoapp.com/p/future-of-text) \- the idea of a quick dive-
down/up through knowledge with potentially tagging/linking thrown in would
seem pretty stellar from a knowledge management system.

~~~
SupremumLimit
Thanks for pointing out Gingko - it looks like it could have the right mix of
features that I miss in Workflowy, i.e. going beyond lists/outlines and having
richer content in leaf nodes. Excited to try it out!

~~~
Ramonal
On daily work for outlines, I use Workflowy, which is easy to edit; and on
systematize knowledge or stuff, I use Weavi, which is a decent product.

~~~
SupremumLimit
Thanks for the pointer. Tried it out - it's similar to Gingko but seems much
less polished, and I couldn't find the keyboard shortcuts! I guess the
advantage is that it's free. I really hope this kind of text manipulation will
get developed further.

~~~
ckluis
Agreed that this form of data capture seems powerful.

------
kijin
Semi-automated organization is difficult, not because we don't have the
algorithms to classify things into categories, but because everyone has a
different idea about 1) which things belong where and 2) how much of it should
be automated.

This is why everybody else's organization scheme feels alien to us, and why
our own organization scheme, no matter how much sense we think it makes, will
inevitably feel alien to everybody else.

If you build a tool to automate part of the process, and then release it to
the whole wild world, people will complain that it files things in all the
wrong places. If someone else builds a similar tool, and you use it, you will
complain that it files things in all the wrong places. Because each of us not
only has a different ontology, but also has different ideas about how we
should approach ontology in the first place.

You could make your tool highly flexible so that it can accommodate all sorts
of different ontologies, but then everyone will complain that there are too
many options. It really sucks.

Oh well, I guess that's why we've ended up with a gazillion incompatible
tools, each of which is probably good enough for whoever built it, but none of
which really suits anybody else's needs.

~~~
walterbell
Gene Smith's book has a good overview of tagging in early "social bookmarking"
projects, [http://epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2008/09/tagging-
people...](http://epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2008/09/tagging-people-
powered-metadata-for_23.html)

Random is an iOS app/svc attempting to infer "associative ontologies" from
navigation patterns, [http://www.datascienceweekly.org/data-scientist-
interviews/r...](http://www.datascienceweekly.org/data-scientist-
interviews/random-predictive-content-discovery-jarno-koponen-interview)

 _" The app also allows you to connect things freely thus letting you express
both your rational and irrational self. There are no universal categories or
connections between different things - rather it's about an individual's own
"ontology" that's created through usage. The "associative ontology" evolves
continuously both through the actions of the individual and other people using
the system. "_

------
bentcorner
OneNote isn't a bad choice, but it doesn't hit all the marks here. It does
shine in a few places for me:

\- Search: Search is very very fast and also does OCR of text in images

\- Cross-platform: Works on Windows desktop and on Android/iOS phones

\- Online: Can also share OneNote pages as a link to those people who don't
have OneNote

I'd be surprised if the format isn't propietary, and there's no CLI. But if
those things aren't important to you, then basic usage of the application is
awesome.

(My minor nit with it is that navigating Sections can be difficult, and
"finding where you are" in a large notebook is also harder than it should be).

------
nextos
I started with a very elaborate mediawiki solution, but over time I've moved
to org-mode.

It's has two distinct advantages: the filesystem is the database (plus a
plain-text one!), and everything is scriptable using Emacs Lisp.

------
grizzles
What I would like is an open source browser that autorecords all my non
incognito browsing history, including videos, etc within a transparent
database / file format.

Even with Google, I often have problems finding interesting things that I've
read in the past.

How it would work: For each page, any time the DOM changes, that is saved as a
revision of the document. This way, I can get back to any state of a website
without javascript complexity by browsing the revision list.

Bookmarks / Favorites would still be useful for saving notable stuff, and
ideally there would be a powerful data management facilities for search (eg.
Solr), deletion and merging datasets. A future project, perhaps...

~~~
otakucode
I've wanted a similar thing for a very long time. In effect, an infinite web
browser that remembers everything. Rather than 'surfing' the web it would be
more like mapping it out and exploring it, with more than just your memory to
return to. I like the idea of a vertical tab bar on the side, and I think if
the user interface were done right, one where the tabs of things which
interest you never actually 'close' (closing a tab would be equivalent to
dismissing something as irrelevant or uninteresting) but the list of tabs just
continues growing, scrolling off the top of the screen but recallable (and
searchable) at a moments notice. It would be major rethinking of how a browser
works and what it does and it would possibly get confusing with things like
web apps (shoehorning applications into a document presentation system bites
us again). I imagine lots of people would presume a proposal like this,
keeping everything you ever browse or at least a very significant subset of
it, as slightly insane... but that just makes it more alluring to me.

~~~
walterbell
Would you be willing to run a dedicated home server+storage for this purpose,
e.g. Dell T20 or Lenovo TS140 ($300) + 4-6 disks in RAID1 config? It could run
ESXi / KVM / Xen, e.g. FreeNAS in one VM, knowledge base in another.

For UI prototyping, some options are Qt/Webkit, a browser extension, or
[http://breach.cc/](http://breach.cc/)

------
bjz_
I would just like to dump tons of stuff into it. Scraps of thought, sketches,
images, archived web pages, pdfs etc... then have it organise itself, finding
links and connections between things, perhaps with some way of shaping and
guiding it. I just don't have the patience to tag things or organise things
into a hierarchy. I inevitably end up with a huge blob of 'uncategorised'
stuff.

I wouldn't mind if the algorithm for making connections made some mistakes -
the important thing would be helping you connect things together in novel and
unexpected ways, based on your curated collection of stuff. Serendipity is
super important.

------
ColinCera
I'm surprised he doesn't talk about Zotero.
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/) Especially for a grad
student, it seems like a better option than any of the other things he's
tried/discussed.

------
eik3_de
While you're at it, please add a spaced repetition learning feature à la Anki.
Our brains are the best PKB, we just need the right tools to efficiently
upload data to it (anki)

~~~
Ixiaus
Org-mode has all of this. Non-proprietary? Easy capture? Indexing? Search?
Agenda? Mobile-capture and sync? Org-drill for spaced repetition? Integration
with snippet capture in browser?

Every single one checked.

~~~
noir_lord
Images and video?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sure, Emacs can display images inline if you want it to, or just open it in
another buffer ("tab") or with an external application. You just store the
image in a separate file and make a link in your org-mode text file.

As for videos, I don't recall Emacs being able to play them directly, but you
can easily invoke an external player.

------
walterbell
If there was a cross-platform, open database that could be used by commercial
or open-source apps, then we could have a competitive market on "organizing
UX" without worrying that a policy change at our favorite indie developer or
global conglomerate would orphan the data. E.g. WebDAV, CalDAV, OPML, a dublin
core metadata file which accompanies artifact files (photo, pdf, warc), sqlite
db, camlistore, git-annex, ..? Currently using a combination of these tools
for cloud-neutral kb:

    
    
      Mind mapping:   iThoughts HD on iOS, export to PDF
      Idea capture:  OmniFocus on iOS, export to XML
      Contextual & tag search with preview snippets:  xapian + recoll on Linux
      Web clipping:  Print To PDF (wkhtmltopdf) on Firefox or Epub
      File tagging:  Calibre on Windows, plus SumatraPDF for viewing epub, pdf, djvu
      OCR:  Abbyy on Windows

~~~
icebraining
Nepomuk was/is kind of a solution like that, though mostly targeted at the
desktop. It would store all the data in an RDF database (with layers to speak
other protocols, like IMAP) using standard formats, and applications would
interact with it instead of having their own storage layer.

~~~
walterbell
Supposedly RDF caused poor performance and it was replaced by
[https://community.kde.org/Baloo](https://community.kde.org/Baloo) which uses
sqlite+xapian. The nepomuk ontologies live on in the Digital.ME research
project, which seems to be a research prototype in Java for a "cross-device
social semantic desktop", but there's no active dev community.

[http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/](http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/)

[http://www.dime-project.eu/](http://www.dime-project.eu/) & [http://dime-
project.github.io/](http://dime-project.github.io/)

Edit: recent article on Baloo: [http://xmodulo.com/2014/07/kde-semantic-
desktop-nepomuk-balo...](http://xmodulo.com/2014/07/kde-semantic-desktop-
nepomuk-baloo.html)

Maybe the semantic desktop should be a semantic server? Run it on a dedicated
PC that also serves as NAS. It would be a relatively small price to pay for a
secure pkb with cross-platform clients.

------
ecesena
As for the research part, I think one major issue is that the workflow is too
personal and not (necessarily) compatible with other people.

In our research group we ended up doing annotated bibliography in a common
repo. bibtex format and git. This way the kbr grows over the time with
distributed effort.

There is a common shared structure. You have to provide well written bibtex
ref and a paragraph or 2 of annotations. The first paragraph has a strict
structure where essentially you reply to a few questions. Other paragraphs can
be added freely by each person (with your initials).

Anyway, this is just specific to research and a subset of the kbr, but I'd
think also to ways where what you collect can be useful to others, and
viceversa others can add to your kbr without generating mess.

------
flarg
IMHO I don't think we lack knowledge capture and retrieval tools as much as we
lack integration between those tools. I use Zim as a desktop wiki and todo
list tool, Freemind as a mind mapper, TaskJuggler 3 as a project planning tool
and Zotereo as a reference capture tool - and they are all very good at what
they do but they just don't work together very well. A high level of
integration between tools like this would be the killer app in this space. I
have hopes that Camlistore would be part of this solution.

------
bitcuration
There is a real opportunity here for evernote and even google. What he needs a
personalized wikipedia, a "facebook" of googleable archive of his selected
internet content.

If facebook/myspace are the social networks for people's offline life, how
about a social network for people's brain in online life.

It is much more than a personal knowledgeabase per se. This may very well be a
knowledge graph in google's scale but with personalized context and
relativity.

------
platz
looks like tiddlywiki got a refresh from the classic version, so that it now
is able to run on node.js

~~~
rasengan0
totally. the author needs tw5 [http://tiddlywiki.com/](http://tiddlywiki.com/)

~~~
jarvist
The Scholars extension has potential for a shared note-collection / brief
summary of research papers.

TW5-Scholars direct link:
[http://tw5.scholars.tiddlyspot.com/](http://tw5.scholars.tiddlyspot.com/)

------
pdm55
I use the Outline View in MS Word to organize my bookmarks. I use 4 levels:
Heading - Subheading -- Link --- Text. (Note that each level is a separate
line in MS Word Outline View.)

An example:

Education \- Assessment \-- [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-
flunking-exam...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-
exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html) \--- test and test often to focus the
learners' minds

Business \- Insights
\--[http://thecodist.com/article/lessons_from_a_lifetime_of_bein...](http://thecodist.com/article/lessons_from_a_lifetime_of_being_a_programmer)
\--- find dumb people with lots of money

I find this to be a simple, easy system to organize what I find on the
internet.

------
achamess
Hi all,

I'm Alex, the author of the blog post. I'm so honored that my post made it
here to HN. :) Obviously the itch I'm trying to scratch is one that a lot
people are.

The suggestions here are very helpful. I think all of us have learned to
cobble together a suite of tools to do what we want, but it seems that few are
totally satisfied. I don't think what I've proposed, or what other have
proposed is insurmountable - we do far more complex things with computers. But
given the idiosyncrasies of our individual workflows, maybe it's unrealistic
to think we'll find a solution that everyone likes.

I'm going to compile a lot of the suggestions from this thread and around the
web in a follow up post on the blog.

I want to quickly address some of the comments on Anki. I've been using Anki
for a few years now, mostly to handle the massive amount of knowledge in
medical school. I've written about it here. Anki has caught on in med school
significantly.

[http://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-
medical-...](http://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-
students.html)

There is no much interest in Anki for knowledge management (and retention),
that I'm working on an eBook for med students about it -
[http://www.learningmedicinebook.com/](http://www.learningmedicinebook.com/)

I used to think that everything I came across should live in my brain. And so,
I went a little crazy with Anki in the beginning, capturing EVERYTHING I read.
That quickly wore me down, and I had to become more discriminating. A lot of
novice Anki users fall into a similar trap. I realized that not everything is
worth occupying my headspace. I've been trying to come up with criteria for
what should and shouldn't live in my head, but regardless, I've come to point
where I want to offload most of the heavy lifting to my PKB. The really high
yield bits from my PKB, however, will become Anki cards, so that the most
important things I remember, and serve as 'crumbs' back to the details in my
PKB. I'm going to flesh this out further in future posts. I love the
enthusiasm here for spaced repetition. It's very powerful.

Last thing, regarding the comments on a better collaborative environment for
Anki decks. I completely agree! I love Anki as much as the next guy, but there
are some serious deficiencies. Collaboration being one of the them. I still
think Anki is the best in class right now, but there is a new tool on the
horizon that I'm excited about, and I think it will overtake Anki eventually.

It's called Memorang:
[https://www.memorangapp.com/](https://www.memorangapp.com/). I'm enthusiastic
about this app, and while it doesn't have everything I need yet (I think the
scheduling could be better), the collaborative environment is excellent. It's
worth checking it out. Perhaps one day I can integrate with my PKB.

Anyway, thanks again for checking out my post. The discussion this post has
spurred is very fruitful.

~~~
hsitz
As mentioned by several in these comments, Org-mode is a powerful and flexible
knowledgebase tool. So I wasn't surprised to find that it includes an
extension that does Anki-style note drills, while allowing these notes to
coexist in same knowledgebase or even same file or main heading as notes that
have nothing to do with the Anki-style stuff: [http://orgmode.org/worg/org-
contrib/org-drill.html](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Org-mode is a powerful and flexible knowledgebase tool._

Well, this is Emacs, it has everything, kitchen sink, coffee brewing protocol
client, built-in psychiatrist and a modeline cat. One just have to get used to
it ;).

From my experience, org-drill is a bit rough at the edges, it takes time to
figure out how to use it properly. I ended up eventually using Anki for spaced
repetition, but I'm thinking about moving back to org-mode for that, as I
start using Emacs much more than before.

------
neovive
I've had some success using Confluence hosted from Atlassian. The front-end is
well-polished and the document management features work well (mostly drag and
drop). There's also a back-end API to extract JSON and XML data. Paying
$10/month for the hosted service avoids having to spend time on maintenance.
Confluence clearly doesn't meet all of the author's requirements, but it's a
nice trade-off for someone interested in a simple pkb.

------
prabhus
Suggest people take a look at CoLearnr
([http://www.colearnr.com](http://www.colearnr.com)), a project I have been
working on for the last 15 months. I'm linking a mindmap to a pinboard. The
pinboard supports all kinds of media, links, discussions and annotations.
Don't want to hijack this thread anymore, but will be happy to have a chat
prabhu at colearnr dot com

------
bonaldi
The frustrating thing is that organising information like is what the web was
designed for. I think two things would make it realisable: \- Browsers that
supported page-editing of the page you were looking at in some sane way \- A
linkback/trackback solution that let you see what (in your space) linked to
the page you were on.

------
rokhayakebe
How about a unique email account, mynameknowledge@gmail.com. Email it
everything you need to know/remember. There.

~~~
TeMPOraL
.... this is _not a bad idea_!

I actually just went and combined that with IFTTT and DropBox, resulting in a
very crude way to file org-mode notes from GMail straigth to my personal wiki.

[http://imgur.com/rfEDgHn](http://imgur.com/rfEDgHn) \+
[http://imgur.com/ACekwNf](http://imgur.com/ACekwNf).

Not perfect, but just good enough to be useful.

------
nicholassmith
I use Evernote for this, as well as a couple of journals which when they're
filled live on a bookcase. I tried a few more complicated systems and found
that I spent more time filing the information than I was using it at times and
just went for a pretty basic one.

------
webwanderings
Between Google Sheet (using a bookmarklet to dump data), WorkFlowy, Gmail and
the combination of Dropbox/Onedrive. I am okay. But, there is certainly an
open-source and unified solution needed.

~~~
Ramseyer
A client would be OK, if not open-source. We may continue to use it on our own
PC/Phone.

------
cabalamat
I used to use MediaWiki running on my home PC for this, but now I'm migrating
to a home-built markdown-based wiki.

------
bjblazkowicz
Quake-console accessible irl organization

------
atratus
I am working on this in the nyc area if anyone is interested. Definitely need
a cofounder

~~~
walterbell
Care to share a bit about your approach, e.g. opensource/proprietary/hybrid,
local/cloud, native/web?

~~~
atratus
I want to allow rich open data formats but provide grossly superior tools for
their creation, viewing, and editing in a single slick interface. People dont
want a personal wiki. Or to use org mode or whatever. They want the computer
from the star trek enterprise, tailored to them. Simple, clean, interactive,
adaptive

I have a unique (so far) webstack that is enables alot of magic but some of
the tech is new so theres alot of exploring atm.

~~~
innguest
I'm in NYC. Would love to talk it over in person. My email is on my profile
page.

------
alpisv
In my humble opinion, Weavi (weavi.com) would be the best choice for him.

~~~
Cainer
Agree. Weavi is a neat product and good at collecting knowledge into a
systematic view. I have been used workflowy for private outlines and Weavi for
public knowledgebase. And I hear that Weavi is going to support private
weavis. Not sure for premium account or not.

------
covi
I use vimwiki for some lightweight knowledge.

------
readwrite
Pen and paper

------
zxcvvcxz
I have a solution for this: Anki. Over the past few months I've created decks
for topics ranging from electronics to mechanics to convex optimization.

They're simple Q&A format and have tags, making them searchable. Best part?
Export it all to the Android app. So when I'm on the bus reading a paper and I
forget how to transform a second order cone program into a semidefinite
program, it's a 5 second process: search "socp,sdp,transform" boom, done.

The catch, of course, is you need to take the extraordinary amount of time to
sit and digitize it all. And I'm barely 10% done what I've wanted to. Still, a
bit everyday pays dividends.

~~~
metaleks
I'm going to throw my weight behind Anki as well. Apart from being a knowledge
database, it actively works on increasing the cache for recalling knowledge,
that is to say, your memory. People usually have requirements like needs to
have a mobile app, needs to be open source, etc., but I'd argue that spaced
repetition should also be a requirement for everyone. What's the point of
accumulating knowledge if you aren't actively working on it and internalizing
it?

Like the parent said, Anki takes a lot of time to digitize everything, but I'd
argue that that's where the learning happens. The process of distilling
knowledge into a series of flash cards is extremely personal and involved.

My workflow:

\- Out in the wild, when I come across a word I don't know or trivia, I write
it down or put it in my phone via a text editor, or note taking app like
Google Keep.

\- I'll write notes down in a notebook if I'm learning about something new,
since writing helps facilitate the acquisition of knowledge.

\- When I get home, or if I have time with my laptop around, I'll open up
Anki, and convert everything I've learned into corresponding Decks, subdecks
and cards.

\- I usually do this at the end of the day, and start with "small" knowledge,
like new words or trivia. After I've put them into Anki, I wipe Google Keep
and whatever else is on my phone. Similarly, I then go through my notes, and
since everything is still fresh, with the help of the context behind the
notes, I put everything into Anki.

...and my favourite part...

\- The studying phase. Every now and then, when you get a free moment, open up
Anki on your Desktop or phone, and do your reviews for that day. Anki will
keep statistics and even show you what time of day you're better at recalling
knowledge (I seem to be a noon kind of guy). Some people like setting aside
time from their day to do reviews, but I like doing them on my phone on the
go.

(And since this is HN, Anki lets you customize every aspect of the spaced
repetition process, for those of you that like tinkering. Although, I'd
recommend reading a bit about the process itself before changing anything.)

For the lazy: [http://ankisrs.net/](http://ankisrs.net/)

