Has TiddlyWiki affected the way you write?

Café
#1

Have you found that your use of TiddlyWiki has affected how you communicate?

A lot of people on this forum come from the old school of the internet, ready for long-form and thoughtful posts. Some even follow mailing list practices.
Yet - I’ve also noticed that many people here have unusual writing styles which would stand out on any webforum or communication medium. I wonder if that can be attributed to TW itself.

For my part, I started a practice a few years ago of writing one sentence per line, which I later found was recommended by a famous blogger (view source on that page!). I did this infrequently back then, only when the situation called for it.
TiddlyWiki makes this practice easy compared to past tools I’ve worked with, because a new line is not treated as a line break. I have always had a habit of run-on sentences, and writing a sentence per line has helped me limit that. To that end, it also helps to remind myself that you can usually replace a comma with a full stop.

I believe I’ve also become better at summarising a concept. I mainly use TW as a personal wiki at work. I expected that I would write a lot more jargon due to the capabilities of linking concepts. Instead, I’ve found that I’m using less jargon and making my ideas more self-contained and accessible to my future self. This in turn makes it easier to share that information with other people at a future date. I cannot wholly attribute that to TW to be fair, as it is also about my continuing professional development.

#2

Interesting question.

My guess is that TW caters to a group of people that are “almost-but-not-quite-coders”. A bit like a group who had found a special kind of LEGO that you can build rough versions of almost anything; They’d be “almost-but-not-quite-engineers/carpenters/constructors”. This means that we, in spite of this niche interest, have a wide plethora of backgrounds. So, when writing, we kind of have to speak to everyone in contrast to, say, some expert forum where they probably speak around a narrower area of questions.

Also, Jeremy and others have set the standards for how to behave in the community. I don’t (only) refer to netiquette (incidentally I was just messaged from Mario about NOT SHOUTING :wink: ) but more so by being so engaged and themselves writing very elaborate and helpful explanations. I mean, we have super knowledgabe people who are at the same time incredibly helpful. In a way I think it is an evolutionary necessity; TW is so special and catering to such a wide variety of people, that help from the experts is continually needed. (That is yet another argument to improve the docs; to free up time for the experts!)

Could you give examples? Real or made up.

a practice of writing one sentence per line,

Interesting.

I believe I’ve also become better at summarising a concept.

“Has TW affected the way I write?” Well I’m definitely more aware about the importance to “summarising concepts” here on the forum: As alluded to above, posts are often long and complex. It is difficult to explain. So if one is hoping to actually get help, and to avoid misunderstandings etc, then leading in the question with a summary of what it concerns if often important. Like you I don’t know how much of it can be attributed to TW itself though. For example, as a teacher (elementary level science) I need write in certain ways to for them rascals to understand.

1 Like
#3

Please consider that writing style can also be influenced by the writer not being a native English writer. To explain a problem it is often necessary to use longer and clumsy sentences. Kind of describing around the problem. (People around me in real life know, that I am a speed talker and writer, but that is in Danish of course).
Luckily the people in this Forum are all friendly and want to help.

I do think you have a point though. TW changes the way we think, and thus also the way we write.

#4

It’s very difficult to separate out the effects of TiddlyWiki use from the effects of the temperament I have — which in turn already drives me to love TiddlyWiki. :slight_smile:

However, I have become especially fond of tucking transclusions (or just tldr-marginal stuff) within the details html element (and widget variants) in developing my TiddlyWiki-based teaching materials. This may in turn have sharpened my thinking about the structure of writing.

Even when my writing will be read in print or in linear screen format, now, I tend to edit (especially if the stakes are high!) with the following ideals in mind:

  • A paragraph is analogous to a tiddler; it should not try to do more than one thing.
  • The first phrase or short sentence in each paragraph should help readers recognize, immediately, where the paragraph is going (or how it’s picking up a “link” gestured-to earlier), and whether they (given their background knowledge, concerns, etc.) need to read it.

Research suggests that people’s reading/visual-scanning habits have shifted radically with the transition to reading/browsing on screens. For better and for worse, we tend to skim until and unless something really engages our deep concentration muscles.

2 Likes
#5

I think it’s quite endearing but I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood by pointing to any specific individuals. I like to see people having unique writing styles and want to see them carry on.

I would instead invite you to compare with writing on other classic webforums and mailing lists.

I think GameFAQs is one of the largest forums and often advice-based, like this place. There’s great content there in each game’s sub-forum, but it’s often not written in a way that’s very reusable. Replies on Talk TW are written to have a life greater than their value as a response to the topic. Whether intentional or not, it’s useful for TW users.

For a mailing list, let’s use Beancount’s as an example. This is a piece of software which requires some technical skill (all plain text, unusual installation method…), but it is end-user facing and not an operating system/Linux distribution like most software mailing lists today.
I find the style to be heavily quote-and-reply based. I often have to read a full conversation to understand what it’s about; I cannot take a single reply and make something of it.

A lot of Talk TW users also include quotes in longer topics, but their replies are remarkably more stand-alone than those of the mailing list.

At first, I thought the Beancount mailing list’s style could be because of the form in which messages are received i.e. through each participant’s email client.
However, I found the old TW mailing list also has the self-contained replies of this forum - which suggests it’s about community culture instead of technology (forum/mailing list/social media).

Each community space will develop its own culture, but what stands out for me is how that is represented in the form of each reply. Talk TiddlyWiki’s replies are self-contained and can make for surprisingly good tutorials by giving concrete scenarios, which the official TW documentation doesn’t typically aim to do.

2 Likes
#6

I agree this is all very interesting.

I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood by pointing to any specific individuals.

LOL! I’m pretty certain my style could be pointed to (I’d think a lot of my personality shines through; edgy, some would say aggressive, but also warm and caring.) We definitely have a quite a few personalities among us. But I’d think some of your observations about “unusual writing styles” can only be made because, as you note, some people write in “long-form and thoughtful posts”.

If I recall, the old TW google group, was optionally emailbased. You could edit posts but those who subscribed by email did not see, and were not informed of, the edit, sometimes causing confusion. This might have affected how quotes are handled by some and overall how a much curation is done to a post before posting it.

[…] which suggests it’s about community culture instead of technology.

Yeah, probably a mix.

1 Like
#7

Oh, yes, how I use TW has transformed how I communicate (perhaps something like a feedback looped weak sapir-whorf hypothesis). It’s also turned my schizogibberish up to 11. I’m glad of it, too. I’m often glad to be free to embrace whatever conventions fittingly suit my task at hand. Aside, Sapient [[Gemini]]'s 2-million token context window has been quite useful and eye-opening (I can provide it entire limbs of my ℍ𝕪𝕡𝕖𝕣𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱); it will attempt to mimic how I communicate as well, even unto the edges of illegibility.

#8

I think there may be a virtuous circle here, people who want to present information well use tiddlywiki, tiddlywiki supports presenting information well as does its community conversations.

  • As I have argued before the tiddler places the key to a record at eye level, and I think this may influence how we think about information and organising it.
  • Other systems put the document at eye level, in someways this hides what is inside the document. TiddlyWiki is the document, website, app, knowledgebase and can be used to store a lot of information and organise it without having to split that information into documents. All information can relate to all other information in your wiki.

The community is also very different to many, I noticed this when I found it, and I help sustain it. Just ask, any question is OK, and it has a diversity of short/new to long term users. This influences how we write answers.

There is no question in my mind that our community has a healthy culture that that supports itself. I sometimes speak out when I see a threat to this culture, and that is not always comfortable to do.

  • I have decades of experience both in TiddlyWiki and outside tiddlywiki developing and promoting culture in large networks of people. Perhaps one day I will write a book on it, but TiddlyWiki has the best I have come across in my experience.
1 Like
#9

Influenced by the fine-grained concept of knowledge in tiddlywiki, the text information entropy of my tiddlers has become lower (the ratio of the total number of tiddlers created using heat maps to the total number of tiddlers users in the tiddlywiki system control panel is in the range of 1.9-2.0). Compared with the world’s popular outline notes, I believe that continuously updating and maintaining tiddlywiki knowledge is not only more organized (based on tiddlywiki’s own functionality, it becomes easy to uniformly replace all old styles with cooler styles), but also more like a work of art. Thanks to the powerful plugin system and syntax system of tiddlywiki, which allows me to customize various functions, my writing in tiddlywiki is full of achievement. There are more quantitative indicators, such as the “heat map” and “total word count” functions of tiddler, which seem to be my tiddlywiki real-time digital instructors. My knowledge base has become vivid

#10

Only while using TiddlyWiki. But I now find myself frustrated when not using TW on anything longer than about two pages without being able to extract the “smallest semantically meaningful units” out for reuse. I feel as though I’ve really started to think in terms of filters, templates, and transclusions.

But the fun thing at work is that I’ve started to use TW for the notes of even tiny projects and sharing those notes with coworkers. All they know is that get “another one of those crazy HTML documents from Scott,” but they all can follow these documents and find the information they need. A few people are now asking me how I build them. So there may be some more converts from GigantiCorp soon.

1 Like
#11

Interesting thoughtfull posts.

I think yes it has.
The need for each tiddler to stand on its own, but link into a whole tends to, I hope, an economy of words while also seeking out connections to existing thoughts.

My first entry to a topic is often an equation, but for it to work with the templates I have this can spiral out into a network of definitions for each of the component parts, or reworking existing concepts to accommodate new information.

And each of these has to stand on it’s own and be tagged so it relates to the correct subject area. I often spend at least as much time organising new content as creating it.

As a more general thought, whenever I see complex topics or systems these days I start to think how it might be TW’d.

To paraphrase everything looking like a nail when your tool is a hammer, when your tool is TW everything looks like TW!

2 Likes
#12

No, I haven’t yet absorbed vocabularity like concatenation and intertwingularity. Also, I don’t use loose for lose, nor do I add the helping verb “did” before my main verbs. But the day may come eventually! :slight_smile:

#13
  • This is a dream come true, having being a professional Knowledge/Information Manager this is the key thing we want people to do. There is often information in your head that is not in the text, this comes from the context in which the content was found.

If everyone did this, including Jounalists and Politicians we may stop humanities slide into irrationality. Numerous factors in the world today result in the degeneration of knowledge and information.

1 Like