WikiPlease

Published 2016 October 27

Following Dan Luu’s advice to blog more, here is a recent Hacker News comment-turned-blog-post:

Someone please make a browser-based wiki that works offline (HTML5 local storage) and can be used on any computer, including pocket ones like iPhones, and keeps our information synchronized between them.

The flow would be something like:

1. Download and install a wiki application to each computer we use, including pocket ones.
2. Editing the wiki on each computer saves to offline local storage.
3. An option to define a personal central server is available in settings. If this is activated and our login credentials are set each app auto-syncs with server automatically whenever wifi is available or a ‘sync’ button on the top-right of the viewport is activated. Furthermore, an open source example implementation of this server, perhaps powered by sandstorm.io and Google App Engine, is made available.

Basically an open source app on each owned computing device editable using WikiWords that automatically create /w/WikiWords pages, synchronized across devices. Bonus points for eventual options to publish a version of the wiki and make it editable by anyone, perhaps using Git.

I got this idea from the Manage Your Knowledge section of Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, that I warmly recommend to anyone interested in learning.