IMO, the major points of Tony’s no-touch approach:
- All notes added via this tool are stored in the same data tiddler —
$:/note-database, as defined in the procedure in the OP. - This data tiddler is a system tiddler, so it won’t show up in standard searches.
- This contrasts with the vanilla “make a child tiddler” approach — and IMO, search pollution is a major downside of the everything-is-a-tiddler approach. I don’t want
MyTiddler/notes,MyTiddler/to-do, andMyTiddler/42all showing up every time I search for “MyTiddler”, particularly if they’re only ever going to be displayed or modified via a ViewTemplate on MyTiddler itself. - Of course, this “downside” of separate tiddlers can also be avoided if you give all your “child” tiddlers the system prefix.
- This contrasts with the vanilla “make a child tiddler” approach — and IMO, search pollution is a major downside of the everything-is-a-tiddler approach. I don’t want
- This data tiddler is a single tiddler, so it’s easily portable in a way that child tiddlers aren’t (unless you know how to write the necessary filter to catch them all — and even then, dragging-and-dropping a single tiddler will always be easier.)
I think these points make this a good approach if you have a collection of user notes that you want to quickly transfer between wikis — say, documentation notes for various $:/core tiddlers. It would also make it easy to share notes of this sort with others in a non-destructive way.
Edit: Another potential use: collecting feedback or annotations from multiple reviewers.
- For this use-case, I’d probably want to extend the procedure to support displaying notes from any/all of a selected set of data tiddlers (which should probably all have a certain tag or prefix to make them easy to collect).
- With a little extra tinkering, you could set this up to be quite friendly even to people who’ve never used a TW before. Prompt them to choose a username when opening the wiki, generate the data tiddler title from that username, and then provide an “export” button to save their notes (or even mail them directly to you?) when they’re done.
Perhaps it could enable a “Guide to TW” plugin, as suggested by @twMat? You could then enable or exclude notes from your (least) favorite contributors, as someone else requested…