A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis.
Personal wikis can be broadly divided into multi-user wikis with personal editions, and those wiki applications that are designed only for single users, not depending on a database engine and a web server. The first class includes many community wikis such as MoinMoin or TWiki, as these can be installed for standalone use as well. This may require installing additional software, for example a web server, a database management system, or a WAMP/LAMP software bundle. Nevertheless, this does not mean the wiki must be accessible to outside users.
Some individuals use password protected wikis running either on their own webservers or hosted by third parties. This has the advantage that the personal space can be accessed from any web browser, at home, at work, on a PDA, at an internet cafe etc. Edits made on one machine are immediately accessible on the others.
Places[]
Personal wikis can exist in various places:
- On a personal computer or other device: this limits the users of the wiki to the users of that specific device or, if shared on a local network, that network
- On a website: this may require people to sign up on the website in order to be able to edit.
- On a wiki farm: if the wiki farm allows this, the admin team of the personal wiki may limit who edits there. On Wikia, however, this is not allowed.
All of the above can restrict the number of contributors to the wiki to both small groups as well as individual users.
External links[]
See Wikipedia for lists of multi-user wikis and single-user wikis
WikiWikiWeb has a comprehensive list of personal wikis.