Generally, I think it is worth trying both this and a wiki. For me, Zettelkasten has some magical qualities. I have not kept using personal wikis I have tried. I don’t know fully what the differences are. But, I can point to a couple of specific things:
A wiki does not enforce discipline in keeping ideas atomic. Imagine a hybrid between twitter and a wiki, where there’s a character limit on wiki pages—that would be closer to Zettelkasten. It forces you to break things up, which can result in reifying concepts which otherwise would be a forgettable paragraph in a longer text.
A wiki does not force hierarchical organization. You can create a disorganized mess of pages with a lot of orphans and no high-level overview. This can also happen in Zettelkasten, but to me, it feels less likely due to the intrinsically hierarchical page numbering. (As I mentioned, workflowy seems better than zettelkasten in this specific respect. But wikis seem worse.)
However, I strongly recommend trying out Zettelkasten on actual note-cards,even if you end up implementing it on a computer. [reversal of emphasis mine]
There’s something good about it that I don’t fully understand. As such, I would advise against trusting other people’s attempts to distill what makes Zettelkasten good into a digital format—better to try it yourself, so that you can then judge whether alternate versions are improvements for you. The version I will describe here is fairly close to the original.
It may be that you can easily build a wiki that does all the things. Abram wasn’t saying you can’t – just that you might be likely to end up missing some of the active ingredients. Maybe the character count will do the trick (but would you have thought to impose that limit on yourself?).
This is more of a chesterton’s fence argument. You seem to be saying “obviously a wiki would be better, why can’t we just address all the individual concerns?”, and well, sure, maybe you can – but you may run the risk of various Seeing Like a State esque concerns of not noticing subtle interactions.
(Something that came to mind here was an old comment (I think by you?) about World of Warcraft making the game worse when they streamlined group-finding. i.e. one might think the point of group finding is to find groups, and that you want to streamline that as much as possible. But actually the process of finding and building a group was also more like an important part of the game, than a cost to be paid to ‘get to the real game’)
Some guesses about things that might have been relevant to Abram’s experience (which may or may not generalize) are:
– having physical cards that are small lets you rearrange them in front of you. (i.e. this is more like a whiteboard, or the software world, something more like mind-mapping than a wiki)
– making the “linking” more labor intensive might be a feature rather than a bug. The point might not be to have the links represented somewhere, it might be for your brain to actually build up stronger connections between related things.
These both seem like things you can implement in software, but it’ll matter a lot how smooth the experience is. (I haven’t yet found a mind-mapping software that quite did the thing, period, let alone one that also worked as a Twitter-Wiki)
Re: trying out on cards first, then perhaps implementing digitally:
Yes, this is a fair point. I didn’t pay attention to that part, but I have no quarrel with it.
Re: the Chesterton’s fence argument:
Likewise agreed. I think what should be useful is some more investigation into what is it, exactly, about the paper-based approach that is valuable (if anything! perhaps advantages are illusory? or perhaps not). Perhaps some experimentation by people with both methods, e.g.
I think one distinctive feature of this case (as compared to other “Chesterton’s fence” cases) is that the advantages of the proposed substitute (i.e., digital formats) are simply so great. Searchability, editability, hyperlinking, multimedia, multiple views, backup, archiving, automatic format conversion, reuse, etc., etc. The question thus becomes not “are there any advantages to paper”, but rather the twofold questions of “are there any advantages to paper that are so great as to outweigh those of digital (and thus would convince us to stick with paper)” and “are there any advantages to paper that we may replicate in the digital version”.
(Naturally, I agree that it’s of great importance in any case to know what the advantages of paper are, in order that we may judge them.)
(Something that came to mind here was an old comment (I think by you?) about World of Warcraft making the game worse when they streamlined group-finding. i.e. one might think the point of group finding is to find groups, and that you want to streamline that as much as possible. But actually the process of finding and building a group was also more like an important part of the game, than a cost to be paid to ‘get to the real game’)
I don’t have a ready link, but yes, this was almost certainly one of my comments. So, indeed, good point, and likewise I think your specific suggestions for possible advantages of the paper format are very plausible, given my own experiences.
These both seem like things you can implement in software, but it’ll matter a lot how smooth the experience is. (I haven’t yet found a mind-mapping software that quite did the thing, period, let alone one that also worked as a Twitter-Wiki)
Neither have I, sad to say. I looked into mind-mapping software a bit (not as deeply as I’d like), and didn’t turn up anything that stood out to me in that domain nearly as much as PmWiki in the wiki class. I remain hopeful that such is possible to design, but not, I suppose, too hopeful…
I think one distinctive feature of this case (as compared to other “Chesterton’s fence” cases) is that the advantages of the proposed substitute (i.e., digital formats) are simply so great. Searchability, editability, hyperlinking, multimedia, multiple views, backup, archiving, automatic format conversion, reuse, etc., etc. The question thus becomes not “are there any advantages to paper”, but rather the twofold questions of “are there any advantages to paper that are so great as to outweigh those of digital (and thus would convince us to stick with paper)” and “are there any advantages to paper that we may replicate in the digital version”.
Nod, although in my mind this is more of a central example of a Chesterton’s fence than an outlier – the reason Chesterton needed to coin the maxim is become the benefits often seem great. (And, for that reason, the injunction isn’t to not tear down the fence, simply to make sure you understand it first)
Suppose there were a wiki platform that did this (had a max character limit on wiki pages). Would you use it?
Probably not, but I see why you would ask—it’s a reasonable test for the claim I’m making.
On a computer, I’ve preferred outlining-type tools to wiki-type tools by a lot, although combining the advantages of both seems like a good idea. Part of the reason is that outlining tools reward you for splitting things up (by allowing you to fold up tree structures to see as much relevant stuff as possible at a given time, and make structured comments on things, etc). Wikis punish you for splitting things up (you can’t see things anymore when you click away from them, you have to open multiple tabs or such).
I also think a character-count limit is not as good as a limited-size sheet of paper. Character count feels inflexible. Small sheets of paper, on the other hand, allow you to write smaller if you really want to fit more, squeeze stuff in margins, and so on. (I’m not sure why that’s good—it could be that I’m merely more familiar with paper and so feel less awkward about it.)
As I mentioned elsewhere, I also suspect that now that I’ve seen how nice it is to be forced to make concepts really atomic, I could transfer the skill to a format with less stringent limitations. But I’ve also seen that I easily “back-slide” when writing on larger paper, so, this may not really be the case.
You can create a disorganized mess of pages with a lot of orphans and no high-level overview.
Well… it’s not easy to create orphaned pages with a (decent) wiki; certainly you’re not likely to do so by accident. (As for a high-level overview, well, that takes special effort to construct regardless of your platform of choice.)
Generally, I think it is worth trying both this and a wiki. For me, Zettelkasten has some magical qualities. I have not kept using personal wikis I have tried. I don’t know fully what the differences are. But, I can point to a couple of specific things:
A wiki does not enforce discipline in keeping ideas atomic. Imagine a hybrid between twitter and a wiki, where there’s a character limit on wiki pages—that would be closer to Zettelkasten. It forces you to break things up, which can result in reifying concepts which otherwise would be a forgettable paragraph in a longer text.
A wiki does not force hierarchical organization. You can create a disorganized mess of pages with a lot of orphans and no high-level overview. This can also happen in Zettelkasten, but to me, it feels less likely due to the intrinsically hierarchical page numbering. (As I mentioned, workflowy seems better than zettelkasten in this specific respect. But wikis seem worse.)
Suppose there were a wiki platform that did this (had a max character limit on wiki pages). Would you use it?
(I ask because it would be, while not trivial, nevertheless relatively straightforward for me to implement such a feature for PmWiki.)
The original claim Abram made was:
It may be that you can easily build a wiki that does all the things. Abram wasn’t saying you can’t – just that you might be likely to end up missing some of the active ingredients. Maybe the character count will do the trick (but would you have thought to impose that limit on yourself?).
This is more of a chesterton’s fence argument. You seem to be saying “obviously a wiki would be better, why can’t we just address all the individual concerns?”, and well, sure, maybe you can – but you may run the risk of various Seeing Like a State esque concerns of not noticing subtle interactions.
(Something that came to mind here was an old comment (I think by you?) about World of Warcraft making the game worse when they streamlined group-finding. i.e. one might think the point of group finding is to find groups, and that you want to streamline that as much as possible. But actually the process of finding and building a group was also more like an important part of the game, than a cost to be paid to ‘get to the real game’)
Some guesses about things that might have been relevant to Abram’s experience (which may or may not generalize) are:
– having physical cards that are small lets you rearrange them in front of you. (i.e. this is more like a whiteboard, or the software world, something more like mind-mapping than a wiki)
– making the “linking” more labor intensive might be a feature rather than a bug. The point might not be to have the links represented somewhere, it might be for your brain to actually build up stronger connections between related things.
These both seem like things you can implement in software, but it’ll matter a lot how smooth the experience is. (I haven’t yet found a mind-mapping software that quite did the thing, period, let alone one that also worked as a Twitter-Wiki)
Re: trying out on cards first, then perhaps implementing digitally:
Yes, this is a fair point. I didn’t pay attention to that part, but I have no quarrel with it.
Re: the Chesterton’s fence argument:
Likewise agreed. I think what should be useful is some more investigation into what is it, exactly, about the paper-based approach that is valuable (if anything! perhaps advantages are illusory? or perhaps not). Perhaps some experimentation by people with both methods, e.g.
I think one distinctive feature of this case (as compared to other “Chesterton’s fence” cases) is that the advantages of the proposed substitute (i.e., digital formats) are simply so great. Searchability, editability, hyperlinking, multimedia, multiple views, backup, archiving, automatic format conversion, reuse, etc., etc. The question thus becomes not “are there any advantages to paper”, but rather the twofold questions of “are there any advantages to paper that are so great as to outweigh those of digital (and thus would convince us to stick with paper)” and “are there any advantages to paper that we may replicate in the digital version”.
(Naturally, I agree that it’s of great importance in any case to know what the advantages of paper are, in order that we may judge them.)
I don’t have a ready link, but yes, this was almost certainly one of my comments. So, indeed, good point, and likewise I think your specific suggestions for possible advantages of the paper format are very plausible, given my own experiences.
Neither have I, sad to say. I looked into mind-mapping software a bit (not as deeply as I’d like), and didn’t turn up anything that stood out to me in that domain nearly as much as PmWiki in the wiki class. I remain hopeful that such is possible to design, but not, I suppose, too hopeful…
Nod, although in my mind this is more of a central example of a Chesterton’s fence than an outlier – the reason Chesterton needed to coin the maxim is become the benefits often seem great. (And, for that reason, the injunction isn’t to not tear down the fence, simply to make sure you understand it first)
Probably not, but I see why you would ask—it’s a reasonable test for the claim I’m making.
On a computer, I’ve preferred outlining-type tools to wiki-type tools by a lot, although combining the advantages of both seems like a good idea. Part of the reason is that outlining tools reward you for splitting things up (by allowing you to fold up tree structures to see as much relevant stuff as possible at a given time, and make structured comments on things, etc). Wikis punish you for splitting things up (you can’t see things anymore when you click away from them, you have to open multiple tabs or such).
I also think a character-count limit is not as good as a limited-size sheet of paper. Character count feels inflexible. Small sheets of paper, on the other hand, allow you to write smaller if you really want to fit more, squeeze stuff in margins, and so on. (I’m not sure why that’s good—it could be that I’m merely more familiar with paper and so feel less awkward about it.)
As I mentioned elsewhere, I also suspect that now that I’ve seen how nice it is to be forced to make concepts really atomic, I could transfer the skill to a format with less stringent limitations. But I’ve also seen that I easily “back-slide” when writing on larger paper, so, this may not really be the case.
I also agree with Raemon’s response.
Well… it’s not easy to create orphaned pages with a (decent) wiki; certainly you’re not likely to do so by accident. (As for a high-level overview, well, that takes special effort to construct regardless of your platform of choice.)
Hmm, now I want to try this with a wiki with a precommitment to stick to a certain word count and hierarchical organization.