Best way to make notes that are easily reviewable?

#1

Hello, just setup Tiddlywiki for use in university.

I am planning on writing a summary of the lectures and notes on the tiddlywiki, where I’ve made tiddlers for each of the subjects I’m taking. I want to make it so that the notes are well organized, and easily reviewable.

Any recommendations for setting up my tiddlywiki or any good plugins?

EDIT: To elaborate a bit, I found that it is most effective to review the notes as often as possible and naturally. Maybe a way to overlook all of the concepts and contents within a certain topic and I can easily and quickly navigate into different topics without much hindrance and time wasted?

Thanks

#2

I am fairly new at TiddlyWiki, but, personally, I like the features of Stoll plugin (Stroll — A Roam-like experience in a free, downloadable file). There is a (tiddlywiki) tutorial to show you how to use it as well as the simple way to add it to your existing tiddlywiki (drag and drop the “pill” into your tiddlywiki).

I also have used the Details Widget for making collapsible sections. Example is here: Plugins — Utilities for TiddlyWiki

I definitely make use of the tabs Macro when organizing things into groups, sections, chapters, etc. More info on that here: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/tabs%20Macro.html

Hope that gives you a few good things to look into.

#3

One key and very quick way is setting up a contents tab, and tag top level items with the root tag eg; TableOfContents then use new here on each tiddler to create new tiddlers below the existing one. See TableOfContents

For example have a Subject tiddler tagged TableOfContents then all your subjects tagged with it ie Subject.

We can share more but perhaps you can suggest what you think is;

However look at the other toc macros like Example Table of Contents: Tabbed Internal

Also learn about using tags to organise in other ways.

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#4

I think the important part here is “easily reviewable” …

So I think using plugins that hide information isn’t the best way to present information. eg: Details and tabs in the tiddler body initially hide parts of the information. … (That’s my personal opinion)

I personally would use tags to define a structure and then create a Table Of Content tab in the sidebar, which allows you to view the structure in the sidebar and the content in the story river at the same time. Similar to tiddlywiki.com …

You could use the date as a tiddler title prefix. eg: 2022-12-27 name of lecture … If that makes sense for your usecase and your users. Such titles are automatically sorted by list-links macros.

If your lectures have a “common” prefix or suffix in the name it can make it easy for users to search for those prefixes. … By default TW starts to search when 3 characters are typed in the search input field. So such pre- or suffixes should be at least 3 characters long.

hope that makes sense for the beginning

PS: You should only use plugins, that you understand and if you and your users really need them. So if they add real value to your wiki.

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#5

There is 1 plugin, which you should review right from the beginning. The relink-plugin It can help you a lot, with renaming your tiddler titles, until you found “your way” with the naming conventions.

There are some discussions about best practices here at Talk. … these may be interesting. … Take them with a “bit of salt” and make your own opinion.

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#6

You might want to setup a zettelkasten : Introduction to tzk (Zettelkasten in TiddlyWiki) - YouTube.

Instead of doing it yourself, you might want to use a customized edition of tiddlywiki:

The fishing plugin, inspired by the flashcard technique (included in the tiddlymemo edition) can also help you to review your notes : TiddlyMemo — Lifelong knowledge, deep in mind

And finally, the tiddlymap plugin, inspired by mindmaps will help you visualise the relationships between tiddlers : http://tiddlymap.org/

Note that none of the above plugins are necessary to take effective notes with tiddlywiki, simply using tags will already get you far. Transclusions are also very useful to avoid repeating info, then you can start learning about filter and lists to more efficiently filter out your knowledge database.

In my experience, it’s best to keep a wiki very specialized and create as many as you need rather than trying to put everything into one, it’s much easier to stay organized that way, and everything stays fast and light.

Other useful plugins/editions:

I think you should explore the wikis hosted on tiddlyhost to find some inspirations, there are lots of interesting wikis out here :

I believe that @Mohammad and @Ste_W (to name a few) would be the most qualified to help you :slight_smile:

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#7

This is a bit of a different direction to the other suggestions other users have given, but if you want a quick vanilla (ie no plugin required) method of organizing tiddlers for easy access, you can use an all tagging navigation method.

I typically will use the title of a tiddler as a “topic tiddler” and follow that up with a “Type: Tiddler” and “Status: Tiddler” and using the tags tab in the more tab, you can click on the tab to show all tiddlers tagged with each, allowing you to locate something multiple ways.

For instance, If you have an incomplete essay on the origins of coffee, you can tag it: [[Coffee Origins]] [[Type: Essay]] [[Status: Incomplete]], and now, all 3 of those tags will allow you to locate it.

Don’t know if that’ll help, but I find it to be pretty easy to use. I do admit plugins recommended above are equally (if not sometimes more) as effective.

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#8

Sunchaesk,

Great to hear you’re using TW for your university work!

If what you’ve made so far is a tiddler for each subject, I would encourage you to think of each such tiddler as a structured “home base” that works like an index for all of the detailed tiddlers you’ll make within that subject area. Use the “new here” (Create a new tiddler tagged with this one) button as a quick way to begin taking notes under that subject area.

I would invite you to think a bit more about the specific structure of the subject-matter you’re studying. Different plugins, and different organizational tricks, may be useful for different subjects. For example, there are equation-writing plugins (KaTex), bibliographic plugins (bibtex from the official plugin library, plus RefNotes, even music plugins, mapping plugins…

For my academic context – philosophy – I found it helpful to use freelinks (in official plugin library). Freelinks allows virtual links to appear whenever certain strings appear in your notes, such as the names of key people or key terms. Each time I discover a new technical concept, I make a definition tiddler for it; similarly with important authors/people. Then, when I paste in an excerpt from some external resource (or if I’m just typing notes quickly), the links are just automatically THERE. I even use tobibeer’s preview plugin, which makes any linked tiddler preview on mouse-hover, so it’s great for quick reality-checks on whether the technical terms are properly understood. Eventually, you may want to convert the freelinks to regular links (as the wiki gets large). But that plugin can help you get up and running with recognizing connections, as the project is growing.

All definitions are easily gathered in a glossary tiddler for review (perhaps different glossaries for different subject matter, if you need to review different subjects separately). Here’s my glossary tiddler (pretty heavily customized, but gives a sense of what’s possible).

I’d encourage you to start with liberal use of tags, and then use Shiraz and Node Explorer so that any tag automatically gives you easy access to its details. Customize what the Node Explorer looks like until it meets your needs. Over time you’ll notice that some things work better with fields than tags. When that happens, just use Tiddler Commander to find tiddlers with a certain tag (or meeting any other filter condition), and convert them to tiddlers with the needed field value.

See also this thread: The FUN and EFFICIENT Note-taking System

Best of luck, and come back with more questions as you’re setting up!

-Springer

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#9

Thanks for the comment!
I also made an edit based on your question
@TW_Tones

#10

I endorse all @Springer’s comments above.

[Edited with correct link] How to have your code and action it too - batch operations on multiple tiddlers, refactoring your wiki

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#11

Hi sunchaesk,
I also store some of my university lecture notes in TW, and in this moment I am using it for academic reading and writing. The answer, I think, depends a lot on what kind of courses you are taking (science/humanities/cs/engineering) and what software/system for taking notes you came from to tiddlywiki, if any. First of all, I would think about things you are already using now and check how TW could handle them, as it’s quite difficult to adapt immediately the new way in meta activity such as taking notes and organising your knowledge.
For example, I took both CS and humanities classes and the first heavily relied on code snippets an drawings/diagrams, the second on definitions, discursive texts, bibliographic citations. It takes some time to gather all of them in TW, but it’s worth it. Usually I use _canonical_uri to embed pictures, same valid for audio and iframes for external videos and other type of content, svgs can be dropped directly to TW, very handy.

I would suggest making at least one tiddler for each lecture or even for one topic discussed, if there are more for one lecture and then organize them by tagging with the subject and, if you like, creating one final tiddler transcluding all topics together. Try to understand how each instructor structured the course and what exactly is the minimum unit, it is not necessarily same for all courses (could be a topic, a text, an algorithm).
When reviewing and studying, I usually keep initial notes, taken during the lectures, separate from further comments, thoughts and additional information, so I have at least one additional tiddler for each topic.
Generally I don’t use many plugins but prefer just to gather different sources in TW. Hope it helps, good luck with your studies!

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#12

Just sharing a quick tip as I’m currently studying the Angular framework and taking notes with tiddlywiki.

You can open a tiddler in a new window, and the tiddler will still be linked to your wiki, so what I did is make a tiddler with a list of task / tiddler to review, that way I can keep that list on the side and set the task to todo/doing/done.

Here’s what this looks like:

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image1910×1038 126 KB

Probably far from an efficient setup but I’m enjoying it’s simplicity.

I guess you could make a more involved setup that list tiddlers to review based on your degree of mastery / last reviewed time, and filters the list based on tags.

2 Likes
#13

This is very useful to provide an index into you wiki, I call this a "“remote control” because each link in the new window will cause the original tab to navigate to it.

  • Since we tend to focused on one subject at a time it may be useful to open a subject index.

But of course this is best on a multiscreen desktop, but you can arrange open windows on other devices.