Thinking In Wiki

Links might not exist because this page was copied and pasted between a bunch of wikis and nothing you can say will stop me from doing it again.

Principles

Wikis work differently than other types of communicative/collaborative media!

No Mistakes - Nothing is a mistake in a wiki! You cannot break it! You should feel empowered to play around with the wiki, try anything you want to, because any change can always be reverted! There is never any notion of "completeness" or what a page "should be like" in a wiki -- everything is always in flux, can always be edited, reorganized, etc. The only metric by which you can evaluate the "correctness" of a wiki is whether it's working for the people that use it!
Incompleteness > Absence - Never feel like you need to sit down and make a substantial change to the wiki or else none at all. Taking a fast note, even if it leaves an incomplete sentence or dangling Stub page (which you can indicate like [[Has Completion Status::Stub]]) is better than having no page at all! You make sticky notes and start sentences without completing them all the time, why stop now?
Pages are the basic organizational units of wikis, and pages are cheap. Rather than in a medium like Google Docs where documents are relatively precious and solitary, where you end up making few large documents, in a Wiki you should feel welcome to create many pages. As you write you should be wrapping the core [[Concepts]] in [[WikiLinks]] so that you can come back to them later. When a particular page gets too large and unwieldy, take some subsection of it and split it off to a new page!
Many things, Many Ways - We're used to seeing wikis as being equivalent to wikipedia, and therefore as authoritative documents, but wikis can and should have a broad range of writing: conversational, professional, guiding, questioning, etc. Everything belongs on the wiki, and it can be written in any way. Ask yourself what you or your group think about and how you think about it - that's what goes in the wiki. Your wiki does not need to look anything like a set of 4000 word encyclopedia articles divided into logical and discrete sections. Short blips, a page for each topic with a single link, a set of photo galleries, a maze, a nest, an infinite conversation, tables and highlights and filesystems.
Make Desire Paths - If you want something to be in a place, make it be there! if there should be a link between things, make it! If it's clunky to get from here to there, fix it! Unlike other platforms, on a wiki you make the structure that is useful to you, and multiple structures can exist simultaneously. Don't worry too much about pluralization or getting the right capitalization - if you end up referring to the same thing in multiple ways, that's the way you say it! Make redirects by adding #REDIRECT [[pagename]] to the alternative spellings of the pagename you want to have the stuff in it.
Dense Linking - The wiki is made of [[wikilinks]], and you should make a lot of them! By organizing heterogeneous content in the same space, it becomes possible to, for example, reference a Project from within Meeting Minutes, which can in turn link to some Guide, Programming Language, Package, and so on. The subtleties of each concept can enrich, rather than diffuse the others - the structure of how a page is embedded in the graph of the wiki is a representation of the many senses of its meaning and use. If the page becomes distractingly blue and red from links, you can always modify the link CSS.
Speculative Linking: Wikilinks don't refer to other file-like documents that must already exist, they refer to ideas. You haven't yet written down every idea that you have ever had, but you can still refer to them. You should feel free to make Speculative Links to pages that don't exist yet but probably should. Those will show up on the Special:LonelyPages tool to point you to what needs to be written. When you eventually do make that page, it will already be linked to from where it should be.
Bidirectional Linking - Wikilinks are for navigation, but also for reference. It's useful to know when things are referred to. It would be exhausting if every time you referred to a piece of bread in the context of a toaster oven that you then had to remember to refer to a toaster oven in the context of bread, or else you would forget to make toast if you thought of the bread first. Wikilinks are always also backlinks. Use the "Special:WhatLinksHere" button on any given page to see the other pages that refer to it! See also Global Templates (and here, and Template:Subpages) for how to make backlinks more visible by embedding them in every page.
meatball:EnlargeSpace - If there isn't a place for something, make it! Everyone is free to organize and re-organize! Don't forego writing something just because there isn't a clean place to put it - the needed organization often only becomes apparent when there are several examples of a thing to organize!
Document confusion and resolution - Write directly on the wiki about things you're confused about, and when you've figured them out, write about that too so others might find it! Think of a wiki as a chatroom where you can edit all the other messages that had been sent. Break the silence with a joke. Be unsure of something. Graffiti "my ass was here wishing there was something here." The space was blank anyway, what else would be there?
Searching Guides Organization - Search is a valid navigation strategy, and you should use it often! It also helps guide other organizational strategies. Search for whatever you're looking for, and notice that you're searching for it. What would things need to look like for you to be able to find it? Make it look like that, the old way will still be there too. Make use of Special:Categories, Special:Properties, Semantic Mediawiki #ask queries, and any other system of organization that you like, but if something isn't working, making more paths is better than getting frustrated by the Right path.

FAQ

How Does Hierarchy Work?

Imported from another wiki - these links will all probably stay red

Hamid asks:

This is really not an issue, but I was going to ask you about it. So, when I navigate to a webpage, let's take the projects webpage as an example, using the following URL (https://wiki.aharoni-lab.com/Projects), the URL terminates with the webpage's name. Now, when I navigate to a page within that section, I would naturally expect the URL to appear as (https://wiki.aharoni-lab.com/Projects/STIMscope). However, it actually changes to (https://wiki.aharoni-lab.com/STIMscope). This can be somewhat confusing because it makes it unclear where I am within the webpage hierarchy.

the wiki is by default a flat space - everything is on the same level. The reason for that is that more often than not strict hierarchy is more limiting than you want it to be - eg. should it be Projects/STIMscope or should it be Miniscopes/STIMscope ? It’s both, right? Part of what makes the wiki work is that each concept has its own page, so we separate the name of the page STIMscope from the logical information about its relationship to other pages.That also lets us have arbitrary graphs of structure rather than a single hierarchical structure a la typical filesystems.There are a few different ways to indicate hierarchy though!

You can literally name the page Projects/STIMscope , or make a redirect to it (eg. try going to Projects/STIMscope now)
Throughout the wiki I use the [[Part Of::PAGENAME]] property to indicate that a page is a subpage of another - eg. see Conferences where at the top of the page it says “Up to Lab Operations”. Then at the bottom of the page you can see all the pages that claim to be subpages (eg see screenshot).
Pages can also have Categories which can give them some notion of hierarchy. So say for example Hardware has several subcategories 3D Printer, Commutator, and so on. One of those is Miniscope. Miniscope is also in the Microscope and Project categories - making miniscopes is a type of project that we do! Category pages are slightly different than the pages we use for indexing (ie. Category:Project vs Projects ) because the category pages contain semantic/computer-readable information about the structure of a category (including its schema, the abstract information structure of the category, eg. a given project has a description and contributors and goals and completion status, etc.) while the indexing Projects page is a way to display and work with that information. Typically I will add a link from the category page to the indexing page.
Another very powerful thing in wikis are inbound links! on every page you can scroll to the bottom and see “what links here” to find all the places you might have come from
The type of thing you’re looking for is generally known as “breadcrumbs” - some hierarchical indication of where you are and have been on a website. There are a handful of extensions that can do breadcrumbs in different ways, and if any of those look useful to you we can try them. I have wanted to try semantic breadcrumb links because it basically gives uniform structure to the way I just sorta throw [[Part Of::Parent Page]] in the body of the page.

One tricky thing about thinking in wiki is that unlike pretty much every other platform you might be familiar with, on a wiki you create your own way of using it. So rather than having some prespecified way you “should” organize something, if you want it to be a way, you make it that way!So return to the STIMscope page - i’ve added links at the top for “Up to Projects, Miniscopes” to return where you might have come from. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll see it’s in the Project and Miniscope categories, so you can also go and see all the other pages in those categories. If you would really rather that the page is at Projects/STIMscope, you can move the page here: https://wiki.aharoni-lab.com/Special:MovePage/STIMscope where you should leave a redirect behind, so then if you go to STIMscope it will automatically send you to Projects/STIMscope and so it effectively is in both places — if you expect something to be in a place, you can make it be in that place, or you can link to it from that place.

Subpages

Thinking In Wiki/Examples

Thinking In Wiki

Contents

Principles

FAQ

How Does Hierarchy Work?

Subpages

See Also