A public Zettelkasten
After discovering Zettelkasten, I eventually asked myself—where is the public Zettelkasten? Not in the sense of being able to publish some of my notes openly on the web—there are plenty of such resources. But rather, one that facilitates collective reflection on relevant ideas without censorship or emotional bias. Logically structured, for example, following the principles of discussion laid out by Mortimer Adler. I couldn’t find such a public Zettelkasten. Please tell me, does it exist? Or is this a utopia and just my wishful thinking?
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Oh, this is going to be a fun discussion! In last year's discussion "Is it a Wikipedia?" (May 2024), there were arguments for and against the idea that Wikipedia is a Zettelkasten or that a Zettelkasten "is a Wikipedia". We talked there about the genealogical connection between Zettelkästen and wikis, from the first wiki WikiWikiWeb to Federated Wiki. More generally, I pointed to the idea that "it's all hypertext": Zettelkästen, wikis, the whole World Wide Web, and as Riccardo Ridi said, even "many of the documents that are used daily in all areas of human activity" are fundamentally hypertextual. Also relevant is the Argument Web, including websites such as Kialo. Because of the hypertextual basis of both Zettelkästen and the World Wide Web, I expect other people will present other examples.
I suspect that many collective works on the web hide dynamics close to the spirit of the zettelkasten, even if they are not declared as zettelkasten.
Some wikis that are built into the activity of a fandom crew about some topics, for example, or collective works of activists.
These works typically grow from the bottom, and when they reach a critical mass the whole become bigger than the sum of the single contribs.
When these works come to build something like a "FAQ archive" or a "knowledge base", more or less consolidated, I think that we are near to a collective Zettelkasten.
I feel sometimes that even this forum has some dynamics of a collective Zettelkasten, about the theory and practice of Zettelkasten of course.
Someone generates a question, others develop a reflection, those reflections are further considered and connected to other reflections, still others contribute with articles and other material to be analyzed. It is a continuous feeding of different ideas and approaches on the same subjects.
I've never really used it and I don't know how it works, but maybe anagora.org is something interesting about that.
Something close could be the concept of digital garden in which work many users, or digital gardens interconnected each others, but I don't know specific examples about it.
Digital garden concept is more open to the "public" and to "sharing" than the zettelkasten, it could therefore be easier to find examples searching about digital garden examples.
@andang76 said:
I hadn't looked very closely at anagora.org before, but it's an interesting example of a public collective Zettelkasten. Here is its "node" for Zettelkasten: https://anagora.org/zettelkasten
An example of a collectively edited knowledge base that is relatively high on the dimension of ontological precision is Wikidata. Here's the Wikidata item on Zettelkasten: Q196883 (and the Reasonator view of Q196883).
Theoretically, a group blog could be a public collective Zettelkasten if the bloggers followed Zettelkasten-like principles (as Mike Crittenden suggested in his 2021 blog post "Blogging as a Zettelkasten" and seems to practice on his own blog, more or less), but I don't know of any good examples. The major blogging platforms have a group blog feature: for example, there is a guide to group blogs from WordPress.com and a guide to group blogs from Tumblr. Back in 2020, @Sascha suggested "Tying Blogging and the Zettelkasten Method Together for Fast Feedback".
Hypothes.is is a web annotation platform with collective public features that could be, in its own special way, a variant of what the original post is looking for. @chrisaldrich uses the platform and has even referred to his Hypothes.is annotations as his Zettelkasten, as I recall.
Many thanks to all who responded! You have provided a number of interesting WEB links that were previously unknown to me. I will definitely study them carefully, and I will try to register on each of the above sites. I think that in a week's time, to continue the discussion, I will be able to clearly formulate my thoughts on this issue here.
A topic I've broached on this forum a couple of times has to do with defining the contours of the Zettelkasten. Is there only one, or are there multiple concepts of Zk? Is it a narrow or a broad concept? It seems like most of the forum participants are focussed on a particular concept of Zk, one of whose main properties is that it is a personal tool. Within this scope, a Zk is not just a store of knowledge, it also stores traces of an individual's interactions with that knowledge as personally relevant connections. We could easily expand that definition to encompass collectively relevant connections, but the question of "What is relevant?" would almost certainly cause some friction, and friction could lead to the desire for some standard of relevance, at which point we might ask ourselves why we are still calling this clump of hyperlinked text a "Zettelkasten". And maybe that's why so few public Zks exist?
I imagine I would only take a look at such a thing out of curiosity, but I don't think I could actively engage in creating or maintaining one. Part of the allure of the Zk methodology is, for me at least, its capacity to generate unique, and, above all, uniquely personal ideas. Collaboration is great for some things, but the idea of a "collaborative Zk" strikes me as being a less productive use of my time than simply maintaining my own.
The biggest problem with that is that you can't write to think in public properly.
The Zettelkasten is a thinking tool. Writing is just the external form of it. Writing can also be an act of communication. But then you need to change how you write to accommodate the needs of interpersonal or mass communication.
To give you some examples:
I am a Zettler
@Sascha: When the topic is limited to one that people are willing to think about in public, and/or when people can write using pseudonyms, self-censorship is not so much of a problem. This is true, I think, on Wikipedia, where most editors are pseudonymous or anonymous, and where some degree of "writing to think" happens on talk pages and sandboxes. It's also true on the structured argumentation platform Kialo, where most editors are pseudonymous. Well designed collaborative software is a thinking tool just like a Zettelkasten is.
But I agree that one can't "write to think" in public properly about a topic that one is not willing to write about in public, not even pseudonymously!
Regarding "people losing their minds on the internet": This may happen where norms are unclear or unenforced. On platforms such as Wikipedia and Kialo where norms are explicit and enforced, this is not a problem.
@vvirr said:
Riccardo Ridi proposed that the universe is hypertextual. If we wanted to expand the definition of Zettelkasten as far as possible, we could go so far as to say that the universe is a giant Zettelkasten.
As I understand it there are multiple individual concepts describing a Zettelkasten. It‘s a personal system. And it should be individual to serve it‘s purpose. But all of them have a set of elements and rules in common. Here‘s my view on a top level:
tags:
#diagram/concept-map,#type/commentsee: Zettelkasten - Term and Definition
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
@Edmund said:
Your diagram asserts that a Zettelkasten is a personal knowledge management method. But your definitions 1, 2, and 3 are not limited to personal use. Furthermore, Roam Research, which your diagram includes in the Zettelkasten extended digital method, is collaborative software. So, overall, your document is ambiguous or contradictory about how personal a Zettelkasten is. It includes the possibility that it could be a collaborative tool.
There was a significant public zettelkasten nearly a century ago known as the Mundaneum and is described fairly well in the primary works of Rayward and the excellent synopsis and analysis of Wright. Broadly one might consider the modern internet as a massive digital zettelkasten with dramatically varying levels of indexing, search, and atomicity. Most here would then ask for a stronger and narrower definition of "what is a zettelkasten?"
If you're hoping for one in the form of Luhmann with his alphanumeric scheme (digital or otherwise), it's likely to never exist. The organizational portion of it, especially with the alphanumeric piece is just too cumbersome for scaling across large groups of people. Standardizing and scaling a filing system like Luhmann's which worked for his own personal idiosyncrasies isn't likely to make it much further than 10 participants in my experience.
Rayward, W. “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, no. 4 (May 1994): 235–50. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Visions-of-Xanadu:-Paul-Otlet-(1868-1944)-and-Rayward/48f451ecb5d5241a7780bf07ac15b4e5699c5c41.
Rayward, W. Boyd, ed. European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past. 1st edition. Routledge, 2016. https://www.routledge.com/European-Modernism-and-the-Information-Society-Informing-the-Present-Understanding-the-Past/Rayward/p/book/9781138253414.
Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
website | digital slipbox 🗃️🖋️
@chrisaldrich said:
Thanks for this historical note! I would note, however, that Wikidata uses alphanumeric UIDs and currently has 116,874,588 items and 24,866 active users.
A minor point - you can create a "collaborative Zettelkasten" which may or may not be public. I have managed several work projects where we implemented a collaborative project Zettelkasten. By this, I mean we had a Zettelkasten that contained information specific to the project goals, which was built and used collaboratively by people working on the project (in one case, a group of a dozen or so people). It was not a public Zettelkasten, but it was ultimately accessed by many people within our and the client's companies.
Due to cross-platform requirements, Zettlr was used rather than The Archive, but this is a moot point insofar as this discussion is concerned.
Not all the project personnel were familiar with Zettelkastens, so at the beginning we provided training to everyone who would actually make changes to the Zettelkasten files, set up some simple, general rules to guide its development, and had a Zettelkasten administrator that checked on its progress. Different project team members were assigned different parts of the Zettelkasten for development and later use and the adminstrator checked for consistency and cross-linking.
This effort proved successful for all steps of the project: building the Zettelkasten database, using it to address and complete particular project tasks, and communicating what was done with the client. I was really pleased with the end result. Due to the complex nature of the project and its associated information, I felt that the collaborative Zettelkasten was a better product than anything that one of us might have produced on their own.
Parenthetically, there proved to be a lot of information in one project Zettelkasten which I found personally of interest and which I ported directly over to my own Zettelkasten.
@Andy said:
Yes, that's right. Let me think about it. Maybe I will also use it as a tool for collaboration.
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
I don't think so, since the very mechanics of how we think and communicate differ. Thinking and communicating (speaking/writing) are governed by somewhat different processes in the brain.
One example: When you communicate, you formulate with a recipient and the effect of the communication act on the recipient "in mind" (unconsciously, in the least). Thinking is independent of this constraint, and can or cannot contain a recipient as a modulator of the thought.
Anonymity resolves some of the constraints, it doesn't resolve all. I want to highlight the second point I made:
Luhmann would say that we are talking about two different systems: The consciousness and social systems. Both function differently.
If people were rational, I'd agree. However, reality enforces a different assumption, sadly.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha said:
I see two issues with these statements as a characterization of the thinking that happens when using a Zettelkasten versus when using collaborative software:
I agree that there was a big difference between private consciousness and social communication with the technology that Luhmann used in his time, as there was no way for Luhmann to share his Zettelkasten publicly in its raw state. He had to create a publication or a speech to communicate publicly, and that is very different from "writing to think" in a Zettelkasten, I agree. But today, with current digital media and the proper methods, we can indeed "write to think" in public about many topics.
In Mercier & Sperber's argumentative theory of reason, rational thinking evolved (and develops within a human lifespan, as Moshman noted in his 2018 critique of Mercier & Sperber) in close connection with social communication, which helps explain the similarity between private and interpersonal reasoning. Although some details of Mercier & Sperber's theory have been criticized and may be wrong, the basic idea that reasoning is both individual and social is widely accepted. Their theory is expounded and critiqued in publications such as:
I don’t really think that thinking and speaking are two separate things. At least for me, they often go together. Most of the time, I only realize what I really think while I’m talking or writing.
And often, that’s when something comes up that I hadn’t fully seen before. Or I notice — wait, maybe that’s not quite right. And that’s when real thinking begins.
What holds me back isn’t really the structure of a platform or whether I’m anonymous — it’s often just vanity. Or fear of looking stupid. Fear of contradicting myself. Fear of being unclear.
But isn’t that exactly what makes it alive?
I always think of painting. A picture that someone over-paints — adding stroke after stroke, correction after correction — might end up technically perfect, but loses everything that made it exciting in the first place. It becomes smooth, but also lifeless.
That’s how I feel about thoughts too. If I try to have everything figured out before I say it, it kind of freezes.
Maybe we should allow ourselves to share unfinished thoughts more often. Not out of carelessness. But because sharing is already part of thinking.
Forgive my bad English — without help, it would probably just be wild nonsense.
I’m working on it. I’m learning. Slowly but surely.
Thanks for bearing with me.