[Question] How much is in a Tiddler?

#1

So, I’ve been wondering, what is the minimum amount of text necessary for a tiddler to not be unnecessary? How much is too much for a single tiddler?

This might seem like a bit of a strange thought, but each tiddler is essentially a segment of text within an html document, each required field being automatically populated, even if there isn’t any data (at least to my knowledge.)

So how much do you think is required for a new tiddler to be made from a chunk of text?

I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts

#2

I do not think there is a right answer here. It depends entirely on the person writing the tiddlywiki and what they want it for and how their mind works.

My smallest tiddler is a one line quotation.

My longest tiddlers are articles or book chapters - the most useful ones may appear in their complete form but then I will often duplicate the most important paragraphs into separate tiddlers - it depends on whether I want to read as an article and/or include smaller parts in other tiddlers. I would guess three thousand words for the longer tiddlers.

The decision whether to break information up into smaller chunks or not is not always driven by the number of words, there are much more important things like whether meaning will be lost, whether flow of concepts is important or whether it readily atomises and if it is just a nice article to read on a train in it’s entirety.

#3

minimum amount of text necessary: “A” for an index label.

how much is too much for a single tiddler: The whole bible.

The point is that use cases matter to Tiddler SIZEOLOGY :smiley: . Far more than any rule. TW is flexy. There are no final rules on sizing.

It is a practical issue of “try and see what happens”!

Best, TT

#4

Good point! :grinning:- if a book is already divided into chapters then it might make sense for many people to perceive each chapter as an upper limit for a tiddler.

#5

I’d agree, but I was curious how others decide on it, since I don’t currently have any personal guidelines in place for deciding such a thing.

My main thought was, “how many one line tiddlers is too many.” such as going overboard with excision, and hadn’t really considered use-case.

#6

Pretty Shakespearian of you with tiddler sizeology ; TW flexibility is definitely it’s greatest strength and sometimes it’s biggest weakness IMO. but I think leaving it up to speculation on the end users part makes good sense.

It’s nice to know that their aren’t too many hard limits on what you can use per tiddler, since I believe in earlier editions there was a character minimum? I may be mistaken.

#7

75,000,000 :rofl: (ironic)

One-liners are a great use of TW!

Don’t worry about it.

I have used it well for my one-para Crusoes.

TT

#8

I dunno, but I don’t think so. But more likely, in past, mega-tiddlers defeated the browser?
Now I think we very free to define OUR size without too much hassle.

My general idea is “make as small as possible” purely as it makes “finding” a lot easier and “variant outputs” a lot easier; having SMALLER segments.

#9

From tiddlywiki.com

Philosophy of Tiddlers

The purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again. The value of recorded information is directly proportional to the ease with which it can be re-used.

The philosophy of tiddlers is that we maximise the possibilities for re-use by slicing information up into the smallest semantically meaningful units with rich modelling of relationships between them. Then we use aggregation and composition to weave the fragments together to present narrative stories.

TiddlyWiki aspires to provide an algebra for tiddlers, a concise way of expressing and exploring the relationships between items of information.

So, if you dont mean system and scripting tiddler, you can go with: the smallest semantically meaningful unit

#10

Right. HOW do you learn to know that?

What a “semantically meaningful unit” is?

Just a query, TT

#11

My spin on it:

The main purpose of a tiddler is that its content can be reused in another context. There is little reason to split content into parts that are not intended to be apart - including the bible for that matter, if it is to be used as a complete start-to-end unit. But then, it is probably too big to be a TW for technical reasons.

Conversely, if the smallest fraction is intended to be used in another context, well then there is reason to split it off into a tiddler.

Sure, there can be other arguments for splitting up tiddlers (e.g aesthetical, memory management, etc) but that is not why TW exists, it’s *raison d’etre *. The uniqueness of TW is how it enables weaving information into different stories. This is what the TW “tools” are about.

Tiddler philosophy formulates tiddlers as the “smallest semantically meaningful units”. I don’t think “semantically” is the correct term here because it focusses on some linguistic aspect, and I’d rather see this formulated as “smallest contextually meaningful units”.

This is why the best advice to beginners who “worry” where to split texts probably is “Don’t worry. Make a guess, or even don’t guess and leave it big and then split it when the need arises.”

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#12

Great points! But for both “semantic” & “contextual” I’d say it is not always obvious.

TBH, we lack a 101 on this.

Just my mild paranoia, TT

#13

I agree.

Play around

You will learn it by using it.

TT

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#14

One end of the question is simple. The minimum of text in a tiddler is zero :wink:
If you use tiddlers with tagging and fields (e.g. to store web links, tag is “link” and a field “url” contains - well - the url) and the text field as additional description then the actual tiddler text can stay empty and the tiddler would still make sense.

On the other side I’d think the answer is mostly about screen size and how reusable bits of the tiddlers information should be.
Tiddlywiki with it’s “River” presentation lends itself best to compact and brief pieces of information but there is no limitation - that i am aware of - to longer tiddlers. It might become confusing though with several open tiddlers when at least some of them are rather large as the order of tiddlers depends on when you opened them.
A single large bit of information can be put in a single tiddler to read it in a linear fashion. It can be beneficial though to cut it in smaller tiddlers that can be read non-linear (with proper linking), can be used in parts and still can be presented (via includes) as one big linear read.

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#15

Right, it is not obvious. But how could it be? Arising contexts can’t be fully defined and predicet (… I think?)

#16

Right.

They cannot be. SO what is the way to help here?

A query, TT.

#17

Technically a valid tiddler is one with a title-field. … That’s it.

It depends :wink: … A $:/state/something tiddler needs a title and most of the time 1 field. By default it’s the text field with the content yes or no

So is a tiddler necessary if it only contains 1 word of text? I think yes, because my example state preserves state, that is important for me.

My content tiddlers range from 1 line of text for a reminder to several hundreds of words for “brain dumps”, that are refined later in probably several iterations, until they make sense in my wiki context.

That’s basically it. … But I also don’t think about that. I use them and change them until they work for me. There is no wrong or right — if it works

#18

Only Zen Users are into that. :slight_smile: …

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#19

Right. It is about using & TESTING until you sure it works well for your needs. Nothing more.

TT

#20

Well, I think the essence in “Don’t worry” is basically what can be said about it. Except for the overhead cost that comes when you define a tiddler (@pmario knows how much this is) it probably doesn’t matter if you split, or not, your content into too many tiddlers because you’ll find out eventually what needs to be tweaked. But, of course, there are probably exceptions where people use TW for something else than a “personal notebook” and other typical uses.