If you want to share your wiki with someone, you can just email them the file and be virtually assured they can open it.

TiddlyWiki is free as in freedom. Unlike proprietary tools like Evernote, Roam Research, and OneNote, you have complete freedom to use TiddlyWiki for any purpose you want, share it with others, and modify it if you need or want to. You will never lose access to your notes because a company decided the service wasn't profitable anymore. If you're planning to write a lot of notes, this should be non-negotiable.

Most notes systems fail at the seemingly elementary requirement of matching the way you think.

Categories and hierarchies are sometimes unfairly maligned. In reality, they are powerful supplemental tools for thinking; sometimes, in order to think about a topic, we need to add additional order to a set of ideas to reduce them to a level of complexity we're capable of thinking about, and these tools give us that ability. But as a general-purpose organization method, these tools are terrible: they prevent ideas from being effectively used outside their original context and force us to collapse distinctions that we might prefer to maintain. For notes to reach their full potential, we need to allow them to relate in a greater variety of ways. Further, we don't naturally think in hierarchies except when we are tackling a specific problem; we think in links and webs of ideas.

Grok TiddlyWiki

For those who have been interested in my public Zettelkasten wiki in the past (or might be interested in it now), I've just put up an extensive discussion of Zettelkasten and how I've implemented it in my TiddlyWiki on my YouTube channel

Introduction to tzk (Zettelkasten in TiddlyWiki)

How to Take Smart Notes

How to use the slip box system to write bottoms-up

Clusters are sequences of notes where order emerges.

You can’t do this so easy in the digital version.

Structure Notes are not limited to hierarchical structures like the nested list from above. Structure notes can also have sequential structures. Imagine the following line of argumentation: a -> b -> c, therefore a -> c. A Structure Note could capture this sequence and link each step of the sequence to a Zettel which expands on it. An example, with annotations to point out each step: (a) The stimulation of surface cold receptors is (b) the main driver of cold adaptation.[[202005201056]] Cold showers stimulate the surface cold receptors sufficiently.[[202005201057]] Therefore, (c) cold showers are a viable method of practicing cold adaptation training.[[202005201058]] The links via [[ID]] refer to Zettels that are compilations of evidence for each statement. The structure of the arguments guides this Structure Note.

To make the most of a connection, always state explicitly why you made it. This is the link context. An example link context looks like this:

The most important aspect of the body of the Zettel is that you write it in your own words.

Luhmann’s numbering system allowed to make sequences and intersperse notes between adjacent notes through adding another character to the end

To figure out what the atoms are, it helps when we ask ourselves what we want the molecules that we create from our note atoms to look like.

In practical terms, he's talking about structure notes which consist of an outline of links to other existing notes.

In practical terms, he's talking about structure notes which consist of an outline of links to other existing notes. They are used to group notes together into a cohesive argument. In a paper zettelkasten note IDs could be used to create these lists directly in the slip box (sometimes referred to as folgezettel). The disadvantage of doing so this way is that notes can only belong to one line of thought. With structure notes, which are independent of the placement of notes within the system, any given note may belong to multiple lines of thought.

I think you just need to loosen up and put notes in the dang box. It didn't make sense to me either until I started writing jokes in this form. Maybe you just need to make sure you're actually interested in the stuff you're taking notes in (or have a use for it.)I would write sequences of jokes as I thought of them. As I got to a certain number of jokes, the system itself became self sustaining. Rather than having to think of jokes, I would have loads of ideas which I could further explore (this goes back to the author's idea of not starting with a blank slate.) I could add to the end of a sequence or I could branch a sequence. At any point in any of these sequences, I could branch off a node. As the network grows bigger, then I could remix jokes by combining completely different concepts. One otherwise unrelated node connects to another otherwise unrelated node and they form a new sequence. Now I have interconnection, a real network.

That's the key to understand the paragraphs you've quoted. The reason for a Zettelkasten over a Wiki is 'text production' ... because a Zettelkasten, which is designed according to Luhmann's method, also depicts the chains of thought that precede the ideas or of which they are a part. And this in turn simplifies the text production -- one simply combines the different chains of thoughts that are recalled by the notes.

Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens’ delineation of Luhmann’s method

I think it would be massively helpful if users had stronger examples of what these explicit creation workflows looked like, particularly at the longer end of creation of chapters or even book length spaces.

in posting online they still seem lost in attempting to put the lowest level ideas into active practice.

Ahrens’ generally excellent book

I’ve seen Eminem demo his slip box to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes.

They get to see everything, and nothing

The appendix of the 2nd edition (PDF)

the first edition

Two Essays by Niklas Luhmann

“The slip-box is the shipping container of the academic world. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same format.”

I've tried to keep a Zettleksaten several times now with no real luck. My most recent try was using TiddlyWiki, with each Tiddler being an entry, usually containing a single piece of information. Perhaps it's the way TiddlyWiki is laid out, but I didn't particularly find the filing system to be of any real benefit to me. After my 30 day experiment I had nearly 1,000 Tiddlers and the majority were interlinked. When I would click through the hyperlinks I wouldn't necessarily have any particular 'a-ha' moments that these articles on Zettlekastens typically try to convince you will happen when you use this filing system.Perhaps I went about it all wrong, but I loved the theory but didn't find the particular application useful. I also found absolutely no examples of a real life Zettelkasten online anywhere.

I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called Obsidian after recording an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast with my co-host Dr Jason Downs. Obsidian makes your notes more useful by ‘linking your thinking’. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia. Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Pages are represented as nodes; pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is ‘growing’:

how was I ever able to organise my thoughts without atomising them