Is it a Wikipedia?
I have the idea that the Zettelkasten Method is similar to Wikipedia; it works in the same manner. What is your opinion?
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I have the idea that the Zettelkasten Method is similar to Wikipedia; it works in the same manner. What is your opinion?
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One might argue, that the Zettelkasten method and Wikipedia differ fundamentally in their purpose, structure, and usage. Zettelkasten is a system developed to facilitate idea generation and the growth of a complex web of interconnected notes. Wikipedia articles might come to light in a collaborative online encyclopedia aimed at providing reliable and organized information on selected topics to the public. Alas, both rely on hypertext.
The Zettelkasten method encourages a non-linear approach to knowledge, where notes are interconnected in a web-like structure rather than being organized hierarchically. Perhaps that triggered your idea @Trini48.
It seems the same thing and can become the same thing for the same model used: both can be thinked as realized making an hypertext.
The main difference between zettelkasten and wikipedia is the point of view of the written content.
Wikipedia is written with the purpose of explain, transfer knowledge to others.
Zettelkasten is created writing thoughts as generated, reframed and used for ourselves, starting from information, knowledge taken from others or insights from ourselves.
The same note about macrophotography can be very different if made with the intent of creating a wiki page or a zettel, even if both are made with text and links. In the zettel I express the internalization of macrophotography concept as viewed by me and for my purposes. In a wiki note I create a "readable" macrophotography description (readable for me and others, too).
In the practice, anyway, it can happen that the real sistem is a mix between two models. My system is a mix. I need wiki-like notes and zettelkasten notes (and not only these kind of entities) that integrates each other. For my purposes it's more useful a mixed model than a thing made only of my thoughts about things.
Just for example, you can compare these two pages (it's not exactly the same entity, but it is enough to compare):
They are both hypertext, but thery are really different in style, purpose, the ideas that the author decides to represent and so on.
A wiki is non-atomic, factual information connected via lexical links, while a zettelkasten is distilled conceptual knowledge connected via semantic/associational links.
Note. This is what @Sascha stated in Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method:
I was just reading this the other day. I don't fully understand the point if I'm being honest.
I think a thought is a "unit of knowledge. As a zettel contains only one "unit of knowledge." But, a container of dog food isn't dog food. So, the zettel is a container of thought. But, I'm not sure how that lines up with @ctietze idea (no pun intended) and helpful representation in More programmer nonsense Re: Atomicity - Writing and Thinking :
Anyways, sorry for the aside, this is something worth noting from the original intro text re: Wikipedia.
I believe that wiki-like sofware can be used to create a Zettelkasten. I have tried this in the past but prefer the alternate structure of The Archive.
You can't as easily go in the reverse direction - all wiki-structured databases are not Zettelkastens.
If you look at Wikipedia at the level of individual differential contributions, in which people are slowly adding small atomic pieces of information, then it's closer to a communally maintained zettelkasten, though organized based on topics rather than at structural level of individual interconnected ideas like Luhmann's. Group zettelkasten typically require much more standardization and cooperation than Luhmann's model would have admitted. (For examples, see Otlet's Mundaneum project as well as Adler & Hutchin's card-based version of the Syntopicon. One could also take a look at the more closely prescribed forms of linguistic zettelkasten of the Brothers Grimm, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, The Oxford English Dictionary, etc. which were also group efforts.
One could certainly say that they're closely related intellectual cousins, but their differences in individual/crowd affordances and general purposes of use are what set them apart.
One could compare Wikipedia with an individual wiki (also built with the same WikiMedia technology) to see additional subtle differences. Perhaps take a look at academic Whitney Trettien's example which is very zettelkasten in nature though she uses the original English derivative words "commonplace book" to describe it: https://whitneyannetrettien.com/whiki/index.php/Main_Page One will notice that her "Whiki" is a slightly less atomic in nature than a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten, but in general form, substance, and use is broadly equivalent.
To a great extent, they all look incredibly close because they all have the exact same historical intellectual roots.
As Fletch might have said, it's all zettelkasten...
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@chrisaldrich said:
I would say, following what @Martin and @andang76 said above: "It's all hypertext." Is it a Wikipedia? No (for reasons that other commenters already gave above), but Wikipedia is hypertextual, as are many other documents.
Riccardo Ridi's conclusions about hypertext are relevant (emphasis added):
I don't see the relevance of @chrisaldrich's mention of how "people are slowly adding small atomic pieces of information" to Wikipedia: that is about text editing, not about text structure and purpose. People do the same with any document in Google Docs, for example! We add (more or less slowly, depending on how familiar we are with the topic, the desired outcome, and other factors) small atomic pieces of information (i.e., sentences) to any document that we write. However, as Ridi said, we can analyze any document or set of documents to see to what extent hypertextuality is present.
@Andy Perhaps Wikipedia's underlying zettelkasten nature is hiding in the more narrative nature of the ultimate pages, but it's definitely there. The "standard" web user interface view of Wikipedia pages makes it less obvious that the added pieces are atomic in nature, and that Wikipedia in fact is a group zettelkasten being built in the public/commons. However, if you've customized your own specific view of Wikipedia; are using an Atom Subscription (and yes, it's actually called this!); watching recent changes; or are using the history functionality (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zettelkasten&action=history), then you're getting closer to the sorts of views of atomic additions I was speaking of. Some of this is also the reason that there is a checkbox for "minor edits" to take account of typos and minutiae which are sub-atomic and filters out or cleans up the stream of the updates one could receive.
Viewed from this perspective, Wikipedia is a distributed zettelkasten of the highest order. Intellectually all this traces back to the original zettelkasten of Konrad Gessner, who uncoincidentally is one of the most famous and prolific encyclopedists in history.
One could easily take small notes made in their own zettelkasten and add them on a 1-1 corresponding basis (including the note, the references, and even a unique identifier chosen and applied by Wikipedia; here's an example with the identifier 1118181304 as a demonstration) to a variety of Wikipedia articles. For certain topics I'm interested in watching, this can be a great boon to my own zettelkasten as I can reverse this process and subscribe to/watch additions at the smallest level and not only excerpt them directly into my zettelkasten, but I can usually locate the original source and excerpt directly from it as a means of verification/fact checking. As a result this zettelkasten being built in the commons on a daily basis can be imminently more useful to me. (Sadly, I don't think that many others are using it the same way or if they are, they're not doing so at the rate/speed/facility that I am.)
A similar example can be seen in the topically arranged group zettelkasten created for The Great Books of the Western World which was lightly edited into the book form of The Syntopicon (volumes 2 and 3 of the 54 book series). One could certainly try to argue that The Syntopicon isn't a zettelkasten because it is in edited book form, but in fact, it's just an easier published and more portable form for me to have a copy of Adler and Company's physical zettelkasten as the end product is a 1-1 version of their card index with some introductory material added for readability and direction. The sad part here is that Adler's zettelkasten has ceased updating in 1952 while Wikipedia continues apace.
For the "fans", one might say Wikipedia is even more closely related to Luhmann's variation of a zettelkasten as the user adding a particular idea doesn't need to add explicit links to other external ideas (though they certainly could), but by placing it on a particular page in a particular paragraph, they're juxtaposing it to a specific location that closely relates it to nearby ideas which already exist in that particular page (train of though/folgezettel).
Certainly Wikipedia has a hypertextual nature as well as a text and document editing capabilities and dozens of other interesting and useful affordances, but at it's core, it's true soul is that of a (digital) zettelkasten.
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@chrisaldrich: Thanks, that was super fun to read. You've made about the most persuasive presentation of your position as could be made! I'm still skeptical that "slowly adding small atomic pieces of information" is relevant, because in practice most Wikipedia edits, in my experience, are not nearly as clean as your example. A heck of a lot of Wikipedia editing, even most of it I would guess, is not like creating Zettels. But I agree with the genealogical argument that the Wikipedia project, and wikis in general, evolved out of earlier Zettelkasten practices.
This aspect of wikipedia is very interesting. Need to reflect about
Long before meting Wikipedia and its implementation of the wiki model, I remember the Design Pattern Wiki, many many years ago. My first meet of wikis.
https://wiki.c2.com/?AbstractConstructor
If I remember correctly, that wiki embraced the concept of "atomicity", in a similar form we intend for Zettelkasten. A page for a single pattern, relations between patterns as links between pages.
So, I don't consider the non-atomicity the primary aspect of a wiki implementation.
It is possible for me to develop a wiki representation of contents using atomic notes.
Or maybe, If I read again that text today, I could discover that it was a Zettelkasten...
@andang76 wiki.c2.com was the first meeting for many with the concept of wikis precisely because it was in fact the very first wiki. It was built by Ward Cunningham.
If you're looking for a more atomic (sharable) Zettelkasten-like version, you might appreciate his reboot of the wiki idea from 2011 with his work on what is now known as FedWiki. It's very similar in nature to Jeremy Ruston's TiddlyWiki which was inspired by Cunningham's work.
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I'll take a look, thanks
I'm very interested in the topic it is a potential direction of development of my models.
I've played around with TiddlyWiki (and some tailored versions of it) as a vehicle for a Zettelkasten. It has many attractive features. In the end, I just like the simplicity (and purity) of the Archive