Back to 2010: Reviving The Great TiddlyWiki Viral Interview Project

#1

Back in 2010 at Osmosoft, when TiddlyWiki 5 was only a twinkle in my eye, we invited TiddlyWiki users to join the Great TiddlyWiki Viral Interview Project with these words:

For many people that use it there is a distinct discovery moment when TiddlyWiki explodes in their brain. For others, it is a challenge to get their heads around TiddlyWiki at all.

This project explores how people think about TiddlyWiki by collecting together responses to a set of questions about it.

I mentioned this project briefly around the time of the 20th anniversary, and posted a PDF of the responses. I’ve now prepared an online version of the survey results that is more accessible.

The reason for doing this now is that I have been working with @yan on a new community survey for 2025. We are planning to launch it on Monday at the same time as v5.3.7, and so we thought it might be interesting to give everyone a chance to read what users were saying about TiddlyWiki all those years ago.

It is an interesting and fun read, with contributions from some familiar faces:

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/surveys.html

It will drop out of the “prerelease” directory when v5.3.7 is released on Monday.

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#2

I’ve read about it before, and it’s pretty funny in there. I’ve done a Chinese user survey before, in the form of a questionnaire with a lot of multiple choice and some Q&A questions. But compared to the results of those surveys, what surprised me and made sense was that only 24 people filled out the questionnaire. This means that there are still very few users of TiddlyWiki in China. I still hope that more and more people will learn about TiddlyWiki and join it.

Another question, should I use English if I want to fill out the above questionnaire? Or Chinese? Because if everyone uses their native language, then we can also see how TiddlyWiki is distributed around the world. But then it would not be easy to understand for other people. Unless we all use browser translation.

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#3

Perhaps a question what is your native language and what part of the world are you in?

#4

I will remember that assumption. In my FOSS-related coaching and research, I often use mantras. One of them is “think fractal, act viral”. It relates to the “me-other” twosome. In your thinking, you articulate two perspectives: inward-facing (intelligence) and outward-facing (extelligence) and you can act on both. The parallel with explosion is powerful to convey that computational thinking should take place as an ambitious yet prudent stance (the way physicists manipulate explosive substance or players deal with exploding dice).

#5

Great read and it is great to see many familiar faces still getting value from TiddlyWiki, 15 years later. There are very few pieces of software that can claim such longevity of passionate use.

The IT world is very conservative in one thing: tree-based file systems. This just limits the mind.

Yakov would have his wish met with the mainstreaming of object-based file storage (Ă  la S3). For now, it only exists in business IT, but its prominence there has probably led engineers to think more about other ways to map reality to data structures. NoSQL is a similar development that happened in the field of databases since 2010, though the last few years have seen a reversion back to SQL and (object-)relational databases.

We are still very far from the vision of Project Xanadu and I’m not sure that Ted Nelson’s vision is wholly desirable; what remains important is to stop treating hierarchy as a base assumption, and those technologies, as well as TiddlyWiki, are another step towards releasing that shackle.

#6

We only have English at the moment for the upcoming survey.

While we could get someone to translate it (and the survey software supports that natively), the issue is more with being able to analyse the results and having a dedicated person on point to support with that.