Experience and suggestions of a new user

#1

Hello,
I have a degree in computer science and I was looking for a wiki for my hobby project, a Master of Magic clone. I would like to create a wiki in the style of masterofmagic.wikia.com. Obsidian and Notion weren’t right for me. But I found TiddlyWiki and would like to share my experience and suggestions here.

IMO for the vast majority of potential users, usability should be the top priority.
With text files, you work with headings and paragraphs, but TiddlyWiki is so much more.

TiddlyWiki thrives on create, sort, and link.
So, in addition to the content, a user must first deal with the structure of the wiki.

The user therefore first needs a visual representation of the structure and how its parts interact.
The first hurdle is thus the documentation, which, even with GrokTiddlyWiki, is extensive but also very confusing.

I find the current documentation too unstructuredand detailed for this purpose, and the user has to read almost everything to find the elements they need for their project. In my opinion, GrokTiddlyWiki also takes the wrong approach here, because it immediately gets lost in the details of the building blocks without first conveying the big picture.

IMO the modern approach is to first provide an overview of all structural elements and use a diagram to explain how they interact and the optimal procedure.

Using my project as an example, this would be:

  1. Think about a tag structure: races, items, etc.
  2. Create your data tiddlers: JSON for a race’s character stats; text tiddlers with sections describing, for example, appearance, culture, or abilities; graphics as links in separate tiddlers
  3. Build macros, widgets, and procedures
  4. Build a template using translucents, macros, widgets, and procedures
  5. Now create your races using a tiddler that references the template, uses the tiddler’s name for generation, and which you clone repeatedly.

A simple diagram with rectangles for tiddlers and showing their interactions with arrows conveys this concept at a glance. This is one example, that the documentation needs more graphics. Visual presentation of information is very helpful for beginners and breaks up long blocks of text.

Here are a few more operational concepts: There are no user roles; the Save button also serves as the backup; versioning must be handled externally using Git or similar systems (why, exactly?). Easy to explain, but different to find in the current documentation.

Once the user has grasped the concept of TiddlyWiki, they quickly realize they need more tools.

No problem, TiddlyWiki is blessed with a highly productive community that creates thousands of plugins. But this jungle should be organized clearly by category on a dedicated plugins page and include links to the respective source URLs.

TiddlyWiki cannot handle basic data structures like dynamic tables and graphs out of the box. It doesn’t need to, but these plugins should therefore be centrally linked and recommended.

I consider sidebar resizer, backlinks and the ability to view all tiddlers not currently in use within the wiki to be important features. The same goes for relink and quickview. What about an index of all widgets, macros, procedures, functions, and CSS elements? Unfortunately, there isn’t one (or I can’t find it).

Yes, you can program it, but we’re talking about beginners and regular users who just want to get started and explore the more advanced features later.

It would also be nice if you could let tiddlers “fly” (there used to be a plugin for that) or run multiple stories side by side. The latter greatly expands tiddler’s capabilities because it allows you to read, compare, and edit simultaneously. But this should be a built-in feature so that plugins have to account for it - some users don’t like that.

Then I miss a structural editor more than a WYSIWYG editor.
Because in the end, I have a list of many very different tiddlers with content, code, config and controls.

Some tiddlers display the information as a page, others contain only basic information, and still others contain code or configuration data. A plugin installed nice graphics - those are now appear in my wiki as tiddlers and making it hard to keep track of everything : -(

So I have to reorganize my tiddlers: 13 tiddlers with information and one that’s just for presenting it as my elves. With 30 tiddlers per fantasy race, that’s 260 tiddlers!

You can organize with tags, but to get an overview first, I’d like an structual editor like a Kanban board:
You can see all Tiddlers with specific tags and interactively assign them to other tags using drag-and-drop.

Next questions for beginners: How do I create a structure of tiddlers that should be opened simultaneously so that I get a readable page of contexts? How can I turn TiddlyWiki into a static website (ha, they are forgotten conceptual questions from the beginning)?

Sometimes it feels like I’m in a library: thousands of small elements, but where are they, what are they, where are they used, and which key elements (widgets, styles, etc.) do I have?
If you don’t use it every day, it’s hard to find your way around again.

I’ll stick with TiddlyWiki, but it’s certainly a rocky road.

I hope I’ve offered a few insights from the perspective of a beginner and user who, although a senior IT expert, sometimes just wants to organize his thoughts and projects.

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#2

I am pretty sure I understand what you are saying, and I could potentially see some of the issues. I’ve thought a bit about onboarding documentation improvements that could make things a bit easier for new users to get started, but I’m so deep in this, I don’t even have a clue as to how one would get started from scratch. Would you be willing to write a short list of the steps you took to get started (think of it like reproduction steps)? That would be extremely helpful to identify specific shortcomings.

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#3

@Vicwaberub Welcome to the community. What you describe is a very specific usecase. It can be handled with TW, but as you described. – Not out of the box.

See: Tiddlers having many roles, types and uses - #17 by intrinsical for an example wiki, that describes how to handle D&D information. But I think @intrinsical is the right person to talk to about the structure that is needed to manage all the info.

IMO you may download GitHub - intrinsical/tw-dnd: A TiddlyWiki designed to support running or playing Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition games. · GitHub and let your preferred LLM analyse the structure, that is used there and how the templates are structured.

#4

I don’t want to create a distracting whole sidetrack thread of discussion.

Just observational food for thought:

Everything is a shiny object to me, so my brain is always taking off in every direction, all of the time.

Why is versioning not a TiddlyWiki feature?

“versioning” is not a TiddlyWiki feature, just like a cargo bed is not a feature of an off-road dirt bike.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a product and wondered why it does not have a particular feature.

That said ...

The huge advantage of not having any mention of versioning (why TW does not have that feature, or even how to handle versioning with external tools), or whatever other kind of feature, is: it causes folk to ask about it.

When a topic reoccurs, it often results in new perspectives (fresh eyeballs!) and/or awareness of new ways of doing things.

Sometimes, the re-invention of the wheel yields insights that are pure gold.

#5

Take stock, as in develop an awareness of:

  • vocabulary (as in the language for effective communication with other TW users about TW things, so that your queries are effective)
  • all of the features (as in all of the “thing-a-ma-bobs”) that exist in, or pertain to, TW so that you know how to create whatever in TW

This means going through 2 or more full rounds (top-to-bottom and exploring every link) of the contents tab in https://tiddlywiki.com/.

Every iteration of a “full-round-reading”, don’t allow yourself to get stuck in mud. If there is something you do not understand: park it and keep ploughing forward.

You are building an “awareness” inventory in your head. Every iteration of “full-round-reading.” you build connections between the inventory of items, and understand each item better.

#6

Oh, I was referring to how a normal person, or specifically @Vicwaberub started using TW. While I’ve only recently created a new instance for some plugin work, I usually just use the node init command. While I’m new here on talk, I have had a couple of TW instances for 6+ years, so I’m definitely not normal.

#7

Pfff, “normal” people are not particularly interesting.

EDIT: Nah, that ain’t quite right. Better: “normal” people are generally not as interesting.

#8

@jordan Thanks for your feedback. I’m not a native English speaker, so please excuse my translaltion errors.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much time today either, but I’d like to share a few of my issues with the documentation on tiddlywiki.com.

IMO a beginner usually reads linearly, while an expert searches for what they need because they know what they’re looking for.

The documentation starts with “Welcome,” but a beginner can’t read that linearly. Too many points and subpoints can overwhelm users with varying levels of prior knowledge.

At the same time, topics seem to repeat themselves (there are at least three “Start” sections, two “OpenCollective” sections, etc.), similar content is spread across different sections (f.e., follow-up links), and some sections are named in a way that doesn’t give any clue about their content (f.e., “QuickStart” is "Download”).

Then there are already tutorials in the “Welcome” section that would be better suited for the “Learning” section, just like the tutorials.

Try searching for a topic like JSON, and you’ll find it popping up in different places throughout the outline instead of being covered in one place.

So fewer sections would therefore make things clearer. I would organize it like:

Welcome: Introduction, Features & Use Cases (with screenshots from example sites – “show, don’t tell” :wink: ), Philosophy & Concept (with a visualization)
Download
Install
Plugins
Usage: Save & Backup, Upgrade,…
Documentation: Reference, Tutorials & How-To
Support: Community, Funding, Bug Reports
Links

I also found it funny that the first item under “Working with TW” is backup, but the tiddler doesn’t explain how to do it. As a beginner, I thought, “This is a wiki, so it must keep track of versions. How can I do that?”
But on Windows you just have only to save. It always creates a copy due to the identical filename then. :smiley: Now I’m using git under Linux.

@pmario Hello, thank you. I look on the D&D Wiki in my research :wink:

Charlie_Veniot: Versioning was my example for a question of a beginner and his problem to find the answer only.

#9

Whatever documentation structure you envision, I believe that to be an ultra-expensive unicorn.

For any TW beginner of any background, I recommend this.

Follow that recommendation, and you can either easily answer your own question or you can formulate a coherent question for the community.

For whatever thing you might search for in documentation that either does not exist or does exist but is hard to find: better to ask the community a question than to maintain the documentation.

The question being asked is often worth more than the answer.

#10

@Charlie_Veniot In my opinion, your recommendation completely misses the point. Take a look at the documentation and count how many points there are. There are more than 100.

You can’t expect someone to first read through 100 points on complicated technical topics, memorize them, and then read them again just to understand them. That’s not how learning works.

On the internet, people only stay on a page for two seconds. Either the spark ignites and the page can convey its content, or people are gone.

I finally solved my problems with an AI that also explained TiddlyWiki concepts to me through a dialogue with it. That wasn’t just a weekend - it was my Christmas break. Who else but an enthusiastic computer scientist like me would invest so much time? Very few. But TiddlyWiki deserved more.

#11

That’s exactly how I’m proposing learning TW ought to work. Look at a newborn and how that newborn eventually learns to communicate via spoken language. It isn’t via structured information: it is via an overwhelming number of things presented in an unstructured way.

#12

Children need years to learn a language, and the fact that there are plenty of alternatives to TiddlyWiki with structured documentation is being overlooked here too.

#13

Well, look at how long TiddlyWiki has been around, and look at how many really skilled folk exist in this community (and those who are involved in the development of TiddlyWiki.)

What you are asking for, it has been asked for before. Yet, here we are.

TiddlyWiki is an absolute beast in regards to handling intertwingularity and componentization. TiddlyWiki itself, and everything about it, is intertwingled and componentized to the gills.

The challenge of creating the kind of documentation you envision is a testament to how wickedly awesome TiddlyWiki is.

Maybe the kind of documentation you envision can be created. Seeing as you are envisioning something, I believe you are the right person to build that which you envision. The process and the result would be remarkable. I would very much enjoy it, and be very impressed by it and the folk involved. (i.e. it would honestly be my pleasure to eat crow.)