Personal Wiki

My Personal Knowledge Management System built using Mediawiki

For the last 10 years I’ve been on a mission to build the ‘perfect digital repository’ as storage of the plethora of information which overloads me every day and only hangs around my recallable memory for a short while before being lost to the ether of my subconsciousness. I’ve ‘played’ with the following tools but I’ve only had limited success as the return on time investment required to store and then retrieve the information just has not been worth the overall effort :

• File systems – whilst there are a lot of smart desktop search tools about such as Google Desktop, I found it hard to define meaningful categories and connections between the different data sources – important attributes to a meaningful knowledge management solution.
• Mindmapping (using Mindjet MindManaager) -a great tool for brainstorming and for defining connections amongst a handful of topics, I found that this tool soon became unwealdly when I started loading it up with more information.

The other issue I had was easy access to my information – having all my information sat on my home PC, served little purpose when I wanted to recall this at work or on my travels. Yes I could carry a copy of the information on a laptop or thumb drive but keeping multiple sets of data ‘synced’ soon became a housekeeping nightmare.

But then about 2 years ago my technical connundrum was finally solved by discovering the emergence of the following technologies :

• Wikis – an ideal tool to quickly capture text as well as uploaded files (images, documents etc) and cross-categorise the data to produce useful ‘knowledge’. Centrally hosting this solution in ‘the cloud’ resolved my issue of accessibility.
• Wireless networking & web enabled mobile devices- now armed with either my 3G enabled iPhone or wireless broadband / wifi  enabled laptop / netbook (and shortly HP tablet…sorry Apple) I can now access my ’knowledge’ on the run.

I’ve been embracing and integrating this solution into my life for the last year in many ways including the following :

Administration – I now run a paperless office - paperwork gets scanned and uploaded to Wiki to be quickly recalled whenever / whereever I need it

Career Knowledge Management solution – working in IT and being passionate about lifelong learning I’m now able to easily ‘slice and dice’ and store  the tsunami of information which hits me on a daily basis. Although I’m good at understanding concepts, I’m pretty average and remembering them long term – but no problem now - as long as I know that I can quickly access previously captured information, I can quickly recall and ‘swot’ up on my knowledge whenever I need it. see more here >>

Educational Tool – I recently ‘went back to school’ for post-graduate study and found the Mediawiki indispensible in storing all the Powerpoint based lecture notes.

Hobbies – I’m a very visual person and therefore love art but have traditionally felt overwhelmed by trying to remember artists and art periods – not any more as now I can capture and categorise this information for prosperity.

Video Repositary – I love Youtube videos and can easily embed these into any of my wiki pages.

Family tree - I’ve got a wiki page for each of my family member / ancestors and by linking and categorising, I’ve developed a very interactive family history.

Cooking – I’ve got a wealth of recipes which are categorised by Food Type and Cuisine Type to allow easy choice of recipe to suit the occasion.

Well that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what I currently use and what it could be used for in the future.  Click here for updates on how I’m using Mediawiki to streamline and enrich my life.