Not only Mediawiki but also wikis specifically for managing personal information like Zim Wiki and Tiddlywiki have backlinks. It’d be interesting to see an article exploring why Roam and other recent entrants seem to have been more successful than these wikis. (Assuming they are. I don’t have hard user counts to compare.)
I was a user of TiddlyWiki for many years before I started working on Obsidian.
TiddlyWiki is an amazing piece of software, but it has too many points of friction. The first being that you have to run a local server, which eliminates 99% of users.
Up until recently, most wiki software was modeled on Wikipedia, designed for consumption as a website. As an app, Obsidian can have more freedom when it comes to UI, e.g. multiple panes, tabs, command prompt, etc. All of which can make the experience feel richer and snappier than a website.
That said, whenever someone non-techy asks me what Obsidian is, I always start by comparing it to Wikipedia. People understand the idea that Wikipedia is organized via relationships/links rather than chronologically/hierarchically.
> TiddlyWiki is an amazing piece of software, but it has too many points of friction. The first being that you have to run a local server, which eliminates 99% of users.
This was not always true. One reason TW became popular was because you could save your data without running a web server on Firefox. Then Firefox decided to pull that functionality, and TW suddenly became a lot less exciting. You could still download apps or use the Github saver, but those were far less appealing than the old approach with Firefox.
At least for me: Speed. Roam is _fast_. I couldn't imagine using a Wiki that has lots of page loads in all sorts of flows because even from localhost, that just takes too long and feels too disruptive, this is one case where a fast SPA really shines. Also, they got things like autocomplete pretty much right, which many Wikis don't have at all. I still find Roam a bit cumbersome (why can't I set my graph to case-insensitive titles?) but the Wikis I've tried have been a lot less streamlined, and as I need to take notes pretty much all the time, little delays and annoyances add up. I'm told org-mode in emacs would be a better experience still, but trying to learn emacs has been one of the most unpleasant things I've ever done with a computer, so I guess I'll stick with Roam or whatever comes around to take its place. It's the first notes app product that feels somewhat right-ish to me.
