A personal wiki is a type of wiki used for one's personal knowledge management, removing all of the collaborative elements for a digital commonplace book, mind map, or zettelkasten. In other words, a wiki repurposed as a “second brain” or personal blog of sorts.

The general appeal for the individual is that wiki software is really easy to use, compared to blogs and static pages, and things like arbitrary hierarchies (e.g. “editorships”), edit wars, notability, talk pages, or vandalism aren't a problem if you have full control over it. If the personal wiki is local or offline, petty things like copyright violations, DMCA, legal threats, or plagiarism are even less of a problem.

For readers, personal wikis are interesting for the same reasons why people even bother to read blog posts or status updates on social media. You have immediate access to a subject and don't need to sift through thirty pages to get an understanding of a person's undiluted thoughts, and it feels more human, compared to regular wikis, since it's run by a person and not a faceless collective.

This personal wiki uses and recommends DokuWiki for reasons that will be explained in this section, but it all comes down to what software you feel comfortable with using, similar to web browsers.

• DokuWiki - The wiki software used here. It's best for small wikis since it's lightweight, simple, you can change settings with ease, and making a personal wiki is as simple as selecting an option in a dropdown menu. If you're hosting a local, offline wiki, they offer DokuWiki on a Stick, but remember to turn it off if you're not using it and trying to play video games.
• MediaWiki - The traditional software that everyone knows about since Wikipedia uses it. You may be enticed to use this, but unless you're running a large-scale wiki, it's pretty bloated on its own and trying to set up a personal wiki is a pain since you'll have to mess with PHP files or grab some random code off the internet and pray that it works as it wasn't really made to be a personal wiki.

Of course, there's many kinds of wiki software than the ones I've listed, but I'm really not interested in testing more (e.g. TiddlyWiki, Notion) or fiddling with old-fashioned CamelCase wikis.

• Everything Shii Knows - The personal wiki run by “Shii”, preserved by Bibliotheca Anonoma. This was something you'd find diving into 4chan history. The rest is… not worth mentioning.¹⁾
• Everything Anon Knows - The personal wiki “Humblefool” ran, hosted on a WAKAchan affiliate. It's not as interesting, but shows what was kinda relevant in the late 2000s.
• World2ch Historical Society - The personal wiki that “0037” wrote, named after World2ch. He did write some pages after 2016, but vanished after I emailed about “lost AA” in the drama bomb.

• Compendium of Personal Ignorance - The personal wiki of “Pato” (Argiebro).²⁾ It's a bit of a mess to dive into, honestly, but does cover a wide range. He also runs an Overtext.
• Essarr Lorebook - The personal wiki of “Ninjasr”. He mostly goes over concepts, media, reviewing said media, and linguistics. Doesn't have a huge internet presence, otherwise.
• Everything Killsushi Knows - The personal wiki of a user with many names, typically “Archdude”, “153”, or “Tokiko”, but not actually “Killsushi”. Mostly philosophical in some bizarre way.
• Nonexistent Fandoms Fandom - The personal wiki of “Outer Spec”. It's mostly niche interests that doesn't seem to have a dedicated fandom (but probably does).

• These types of wikis were kinda trendy in the late 2000s, but most of them have been abandoned.
  • Some people tried to coin a new term for personal wikis, but “bliki” and “bloki” honestly look like bad video game onomatopoeia. I'll make an exception for “wikiblog” since it's the most serious one.
• If you write long articles, your writing may improve but you might feel a need to redo your older articles which is fairly normal, but do consider the number of articles and time spent writing them.
• It's called a “gèrén wiki” (個人Wiki/个人Wiki) in Chinese and a “kojin wiki” (個人Wiki) in Japanese.

• Personal wiki on Wikipedia - It's just a weak list of software.
• Personal wiki on Everything Shii Knows - Some of this is very outdated.
• Personal wiki on Compendium of Personal Ignorance