Best Practice - One TW or several (for large projects like bookwriting)?

#1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been mulling over a particular “conundrum”, if that’s what you can call it, for the past few weeks or so. Not reaching any satisfactory solution, I’m hoping someone here has some insights.

The background is that I use TiddlyWiki a lot in my personal life - to write down and cross-relate notes about important life events, interesting books, projects, people I meet, etc.

Since I am a (part-time) author, I decided I would use TiddlyWiki as an “information store” for my next book. What I’m wondering is this: Should I put everything (all the characters, locations, events, worldbuilding, etc.) into my ordinary TW, or create a separate one just for the book?

I can see pros and cons to both. The book promises to be a rather large project with lots of fictional information included, which would severely bloat the tag space, introduce loads of new fields and would mean deduplicating a lot of Tiddler titles (e.g. if I have a character called “John Smith”, I’d probably have to name him “John Smith (Character in book XYZ)”, because I already know a John Smith in real life).

On the other hand, putting everything into the same TW would allow crossreferencing bits and pieces (probably rarely). Plus, seeing TW as a sort of “brain extension”, my brain is obviously also not split into a “personal life” part and a “book part”, so why should TW?

Does anyone have any guidance on how to approach this and what might be more advisable? Thanks in advance.

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#2

I use one wiki for calendar/todo/learning-notes, so it is basically all-in-one, and I’ve join The 5,000 Tiddler Club – People with the Need for Speed,and works fine.

Don’t split wiki due to performance issue, because it can be resolved during development.

But you can choose to split wiki, if you find frequent title / search result conflicts, which can’t be mitigated easily. (though we can filter by tag when searching…So there will be no reason for split wikis…)

#3

My first instinct was to not split them because it would cause overlap, but at the same time, it may get cumbersome to keep it in a single TW. If you do choose to have two separate TWs and occasionally need to cross link something with reality, remember you can export tiddlers from one TW and import them into the fictional one. That would split them, so it wouldn’t update across the TWs, but at least you’d hav a starting point.

#4

I break things into multiple TW’s just because it fits my thinking better (this cabinet is everything for project A, this cabinet is for project B, etc.), but because of my old job, I am long used to working between apps, having lots of tabs open, etc. I think having multiple, silo’d instances of TW running is feature.

On a related issue, does anyone know if the performance takes a bigger hit by increasing the number of tiddlers, or by the overall file size? I know that increasing tiddler numbers increases file size, but, for example, one of my project files has over 3000 tiddlers and is 6mb; another has 250 but is 32mb because of the length of some reference material and the inclusion of images. Is there a point where one method or the other begins to cause problems? That would factor in to whether you should break these into multiple files.

#5

Welcome to the community, @Riverstream!

Of course the answer is “it depends”, but I personally would lean toward a separate wiki. When you’re heads-down working on world-building for your book, do you want your tool to also be reminding you of tomorrow’s dentist appointment? Do you want the list of People to intermingle that minor but crucial secondary character with Aunt Beatrice and your best friend’s cousin?

And vice-versa, of course, but those intrusions would probably be less problematic.

Also, if you get writer’s block working on that book and decide to temporarily switch to another writing project, do you want them running together?

But maybe I’m not the right person to ask. I have twenty or so wikis that I work on nearly weekly, some daily. Right now at work, localhost ports 7453 - 7461 are each dedicated to separate wikis, half of them local copies of ones that I maintain for public (well, inside GigantiCorp public) consumption, the others including one general personal wiki and a few I’m working on for eventual public consumption.

I’d be curious to hear success stories for those who combine a personal wiki with one for larger projects. It sounds extremely challenging.

#6

I personally would go with a separated TW for the book. If needed I would create “link-tiddlers” that link to the private wiki if needed.

So I personally would not mix personal info with fictional info.

Just my thought

#7

A hybrid would be to make a new copy of your existing Personal TW and use that for the starting point of your book writing activities with the view that you cull ‘personal’ tiddlers over time (from the book writing project) as you come across them if you are sure they will never play a role in the book.

It has the disadvantage that it only provides your personal stuff as a snapshot at a point in time and does not grow with your personal TW unless you manually copy tiddlers across.

It’s probably not a good idea just adding it for completeness sake.

One thought - if you do mix personal tiddlers with tiddlers for your book then it might be worth creating a new tag ‘personal’ and perhaps investigating if you can also have a default tag for any subsequent new tiddlers 'book1" or something more creative than that. The point I am making is that if you go for any mixed solution then now is the best time to anticipate some need to quickly separate or sort the two types of tiddler. I used the unimaginative tag “book1” in anticipation of book2 - future proofing.

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#9

Time permitting, could you explain “link-tiddlers”? Would that be a way to jump from a link in one TW to a given tiddler in a different TW?

#10

@Riverstream Welcome.

Can I ask you to review The Memory Keeper, a TiddlyWiki solution. This was designed for genealogical research, however I push it to support authors of fiction and nonfiction.

Instead populating it with real people, places and events, authors can populate it with fictional characters, fictional places and fictional events. All can be crossed referenced.

Then there is a section to actually write various book elements. When you mention a person, for example, in your writing with a link to the person the system, when viewing a person, is able to list all references about a person in your writing.

Separately, MK has an external linking feature, enabling to reference external tiddlers. The idea of this feature is based on having multiple TW solutions with exactly the same tiddler title, where each may have more details than the other. Eg. I have two solutions with John Smith—I can cross reference these two tiddlers across projects.

Any feedback you may have would be appreciated. It is the only way this can be enhanced. I think I’m the only author wannabe that uses the authoring MK feature.

Currently there is no epub export, but I want implement one.

https://clsturgeon.github.io/MemoryKeeper/

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#11

I’d make a new one, explicitly because of the tag/title/field bloat, and yoink favored view/edit templates from your current Brain-wiki.

I also haven’t played with it myself, but @Mohammad has the searchwikis plugin, which might, if your forecast of cross-wiki pollination is ‘seldom’, might work well.

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#12

Hi everyone!

Thank you all to the many kind and thoughtful replies. Giving it some thought, I feel that I agree more with those recommending two wikis - especially with the nice suggestions for linking between wikis.

Truth be told, I can see the advantages of having everything in one wiki, but the one thing that keeps bothering me is this mixing of “real” information (actual people, actual places, actual knowledge) with the purely fictional. Tags can help, of course, but given the number of tags I plan to use for writing (e.g. “Character”, “Location”, “Event”, “Magic”, etc.) I can already see that the bloat in tags it would create would be huge. Also, quick searches become much more cumbersome if there’s too many hits.

In case anyone in a similar situation stumbles on this conversation in the future, I’ll try to report back in a couple of months to report on how it’s going and whether I then still feel it was the right choice.

#13

My own experiences tell me to use separate TiddlyWikis. The big problem with multiple/separate Tws is that you may lose information and forget where you have stored a special piece of information. One answer to this problem is to use a tool to be able to search from a dashboard or a main wiki to be able to see all TWs. See searchwiki and @saqimtiaz wikifarm.

#14

Reading this topic got me an idea. The GSD5 plugin has a feature called realms. Actions and projects can optionally be assigned a realm, it is then possible to see only actions/projects of a given realm (e.g. work, personal) in the UI of the plugin. This makes tiddlers from other realms simply not be shown in the plugins UI, they are still present in the wiki.

My idea is a tiddler hiding mechanism, which would store selected tiddlers in a way that they are not actual tiddlers anymore, e.g. as JSON data. So e.g. all tiddlers not tagged with “Book” could appear hidden when wished. I recall there was an interesting thread discussing tiddler stores, a related application is @Mohammad’s recycle bin plugin.

This is just a quick idea, I don’t know how reliable such solution would be. Some problems I can imagine already:

  • What if a tiddler “Foo” is hidden/stored and we try to create a new one with the same name? A mechanism to prevent this would be necessary.
  • Relink wouldn’t update links in the hidden/stored tiddlers.

And of course, I would be not surprised at all if someone has already tried or made it :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

#15

I created a separate TW for managing a novel that I have been writing off and on. The actual writing is done in external text files, but since 90% of my writing was already being done in TiddlyWiki, I decided to just use the tool I am already the most familiar with. The only challenge is updating it to newer versions of TW because I just find that a rather tedious task. I often would write journal entries about my progress on the novel, but after awhile I exported some of those out since it would clutter up my search results. But mostly because these random thoughts weren’t really all that helpful to go back and re-read.

#16

I have not given a comprehensive answer here because I have argued in favor of multiple wikis many times, you may benefit from some search effort in talk.tiddlywiki. One of my favorite words here is curate or curation

I am curious why this is the case?

I can share my methods which makes it extremely easy, and backwards compatibility usually solves things?

  • But having different wikis for different functions they tend to have different plugins and often less complexity or risk.
  • One that has come up recently is to upgrade relink before upgrading wikis using relink, to 5.3.x but this is not common. Relink could be expected to need an update because it does reach deeply into tiddlywiki (and powerful).

Actually I may make a Page Control button version of my own single file local wiki upgrade process, which can be used on other wikis eg tiddlyhost, by temporary download. for example

  • I use click, click, paste, click, click, paste, click, click, reload tab to upgrade and this is easy to follow.
#17

Hi @vilc
Themes and palettes work like what you described. When a them is loaded, other themes are there but not loaded.

Also, there is an edition used as a book reader (twpub viewer) and it allows to work in a similar way, but when you load a book it is visible alongside with other loaded books. @xcazin can explain this edition more

#18

I use a single tiddlywiki for all tiddlers, but if you plan to go that route, you need to have a good set of guidelines for you to follow to keep the titling consistent and easy to use.

The best example I can offer is wikipedias format of “Title (Context)” which works well for people, places, etc.

If your going to also use it for journalling or filtered listing, you can do something like “date (journal entry)” or “All Characters Section (StoryName)”

But that is just what I found to work without too much difficulty.

If your tw gets too big, exporting tiddlers and archiving them outside of the tw is an option, its just a matter of keeping them organized and whatnot.

#19

Me too. 1 book = 1 TiddlyWiki.

I handle that with @pmario’s bundler plugin. The “core” wiki tools for authoring are saved as a bundle and imported into each new book. The data (character info, plot arcs, locations, blah blah) stay with the individual book.

True, but where else would it go? You need them :wink:

See above – you need the bundler plugin and that problem never arises.

Well, that’s not true in my case. I can imagine it being an issue for prolific authors handling plot arcs across a massive series, but in my stuff, never happens.

My personal prefs, not “do this, don’t do that”…

  1. Write like you want it to look. For me that’s serif fonts in an editor ~5 inches wide.
  2. Have a view open that displays the book page as you’d like it to appear – again, serif fonts, five inches wide.
  3. Custom viewers for characters, locations, etc. placed at fixed positions on screen (I have four screens so my book wikis are w--i----d------e
  4. Decide if you’re working on your wiki or writing your book. I can’t be a wiki developer and an author at the same time.
#20

Overtime I might experiment with different settings on one TW or another, but I have been working at adding a prefix $:/mk/ to my own core modifications, so they don’t get lost too much. I also try to document each time I make a change to various settings. I also like to upgrade by first downloading an empty TiddlyWiki and performing all of my modifications one by one so I can review to see if anything is broken before importing the regular content again. But I would be happy to split this conversation off into a separate topic.