A personal wiki is a type of wiki utilized 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.

Back in the late 2000s, there used to be a small personal wiki craze, but most of these projects ended up being abandoned for one reason or another. In recent years, however, there has been a curious personal wiki renaissance, though not at the level of the late 2000s.

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 reason why people even bother to read blog posts or status updates on social media. You have immediate access to a subject and, probably, don't need to sift through thirty pages to get an understanding of a person's undiluted thoughts, plus it feels more 'human' since it's run by a person and not a faceless collective like regular wikis.

There is a wide variety of wiki software, as well as text-editing software, that is compatible with the personal wiki format, and some are more compatible with others. Unfortunately, most of the major advancements in personal wiki software came after I had already established this wiki, and I don't really have time to dive into or experiment with every single one, so this section isn't going to be a super useful.

If you want the sales pitch: this personal wiki uses DokuWiki which, unlike MediaWiki, is relatively light and you don't need to set up a database. Just select the correct option from the dropdown menu. You also have DokuWiki on a Stick if you want to run an offline wiki instead, just remember to close that webserver. For this personal wiki's setup, see the DokuWiki article.

As I mentioned before, the times have changed. TiddlyWiki and Zim are not the only close alternatives. Nowadays, there's Microsoft OneNote, BookStack, Notion, Joplin, and Obsidian. I would be cautious about some of these being freemium or proprietary software in the event of a 'nightmare' scenario, so don't be afraid to make a small donation to the developers after honing in on one.

Toggle bad and useless chart.

Wiki software		Donate page
Microsoft OneNote Proprietary	20031)	It's Microsoft.
DokuWiki	2004	Donate
TiddlyWiki	2004	Donate
Zim	2008	Donate
Bookstack	2015	Donate
Notion Proprietary	2016	Freemium
Joplin	2017	Donate
Obsidian Proprietary	2020	Freemium

• 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 of it is not worth mentioning.
• Everything Anon Knows - The personal wiki “Humblefool” ran, hosted on a WAKAchan affiliate. It's not as interesting, but it shows what was kind of 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 kind 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, often “Archdude”, “153”, or “Tokiko”, but not actually “Killsushi”. Mostly philosophical in some bizarre way.
• The Nonexistent Fandoms Fandom - The personal wiki of “Outer”, but it's kind of a website at the same time. Covers some more obscure AA stuff, amongst other things.

Generally speaking, the main criticism against personal wikis is 'having a subjective opinion', which shouldn't be a surprise. These kinds of things are bound to upset people. Nobody cares whenever you're 'right', but people are primed to impale you whenever you're 'wrong' in their eyes. Honestly, people have been doing this for ages, whether it be bloggers, columnists, talk show hosts, talk radio hosts, and so forth.³⁾

You just have to own it, stop caring after getting enough strongly worded messages, and know that there's a relatively small chance that people would recognize you anyways. Eventually, it gets amusing to see when critics dance around being upset over a subjective opinion and, rather than admit this or talk it out, they'll use grandiose words like 'gossip', 'narrative', 'propaganda', 'whitewashing', etc.

In a way, this personal wiki is a bit weird because it's written in an 'encyclopedic' manner, when most of them usually amount to a jumble of notes or resources, and the format can make it 'impersonal' in some regard because it relies on third-party sources to string together some semblance of a story, which is what historians and drama-oriented communities do when interesting stories have a void of authors telling them.

Some have argued that a 'true personal wiki' would consist of editorial pieces, but I'd argue that trying to reinvent the blog in a digital age where blogging software and microblogging platforms are abundant just seems incredibly redundant, though I suppose it is flattering to have my opinion held in such regard. All in all, personal wikis are 'personal' because they are personally run by one person.

• There have been attempts to coin a term for the personal wiki, but “wikiblog” is the only attempt that sounds serious. WikiWiki founder Ward Cunningham tried coining “bliki”,⁴⁾ but it sounds like bad video game onomatopoeia, nobody respects it,⁵⁾⁶⁾ and people will just think of a pistol now.
• When you frame personal wikis into the so-called Stages of the Web model: would it fit into “Web 1.0” because it delivers static content, or “Web 2.0” because of the software that it borrows?
• Once you've spent a long time gaining experience, writing personal wiki articles, you may feel the need to constantly redo your older articles, but do consider the amount of time you've spent on them.
• Be warned that public personal wikis will be vulnerable to unauthorized AI scraping, and this style of writing can be a poison if you have college or university aspirations. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for students to spend hours writing an essay, only for it to be called AI-generated?
• You probably won't find much, but a personal wiki is known as a “gèrén wiki” (个人Wiki, 个人维基) in Chinese, a “kojin wiki” (個人Wiki) in Japanese, and a “gaein wiki” (개인 위키) in Korean.

• Personal Q&A
• “Regarding the 'Everything Person Knows' Naming Convention”

• 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
• Personal wiki on Essarr Lorebook
• Observing personal wikis - This one is a blog post, actually.