[tw5] How Many Tiddlers Should I Use?

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#1

I’m a TiddlyWiki beginner and I’m planning to use it to organize some of my math thoughts. This includes various theorems and their proofs. I have a couple of different ideas for how to organize the information into tiddlers, but I’m not sure which is the best for my case. Here they are:
Each theorem gets a single tiddler with its statement and proof in the text field, or perhaps the proof in its own field and transcluded into the text.
Each theorem gets a statement tiddler and a proof tiddler. One would link to the other or have a reference to the other in a field, or the proof tiddler would be tagged with the statement tiddler. The proof tiddler would be transcluded into the statement tiddler.
Each theorem would not only get a statement and proof tiddler, but also a tiddler for each individual step of the proof. The steps in the proof would link to others or reference them in their fields in order to show how each step depends on earlier ones. A table of contents macro would be used to bring all of the steps (and their “dependencies”) together into a full proof.
My favorite so far is the third; I like how the connections between steps are not just written out, but represented via links. However I am worried that it will be more time consuming to create all of those tiddlers, and that the number of tiddlers would make the wiki too large, taking up too much space and maybe causing performance issues.
So which of these options is probably the best for this scenario? Can TiddlyWiki handle the volume of tiddlers required for the third option, and would it be substantially more time-consuming? Is there a better option that I haven’t thought of?
Thanks for reading my long question and thanks in advance for any answers.

System information:
Windows, Chromium-based browser, TiddlyWiki version 5.2.1

1 Like
#2

Welcome qazxwecvr

Can TiddlyWiki handle the volume of tiddlers required for the third option, and would it be substantially more time-consuming?

My goodness - how many tens of thousands of tiddlers are you planning to make? Unless your plan includes having TW perform actual math calculations, I can’t imagine that you would have too many tiddlers based on what you describe. They’re just text, right? That you will add manually. Or will it be full with graphs? As for time consuming; How much time would it take to type it into any other software? Are you worried that the UI in TW will add substantially to each typing, compared to elsewhere, or exactly what are you asking?

<:-)

#3

(Sorry if this is a repeat; I thought I replied, but I don’t see my reply, so I’m replying again just in case.)

I wasn’t planning on doing anything that complex; everything I’m describing is just text and manually created. I don’t know how much metadata each tiddler includes, so I didn’t know how much of a difference it makes to spread out information so “thinly,” and if doing so could lead to the wiki’s size being a problem (in terms of storage space or performance) Originally I thought it might be time-consuming to create all of the connections between tiddlers, although after thinking about it more, I realize that it couldn’t possibly be that much extra work.

#4

I wasn’t planning on anything fancy like that; I just don’t know how much metadata is contained in each tiddler, and was wondering if spreading information over too many tiddlers would increase the total amount of data by a problematic amount. For the second part, I was considering if it would take a lot of time entering the contents of fields and dealing with linking the tiddlers together, although now, I realize that that would probably be insignificant.

#5

Hi and Welcome,

I think all 3 scenarios you describe can be created. …

IMO what Mat wanted to find out was: How many tiddlers you want to create. So How many theorems are you talking about and how many steps does 1 proof have.

Are you talking about 100 tiddlers or 1000 or several 10th of 1000 ?

-mario

#6

Probably not too many; I’ll probably at the very most record a few dozen theorems whose proofs involve at the very most a dozen or two steps. From Mat’s answer it seems like it won’t be an issue.

#7

You are right. With those numbers it looks OK.

#8

You are right. With those numbers it looks OK.

Just to be clear: It is not just “OK”, it should be absolutely no problem. There are wikis with many thousand tiddlers that work very well. What can bog the system down is heavy use of embedded(!) images, or other big embedded data for that matter, and when the system needs to perform a lot of calculations to render things, like if you do a lot of nested loops that search through all tiddlers etc, and then include this in e.g a viewtemplate so it is active all the time. But what you describe sounds nothing like this and I’m sure you’ll find TW perfect for what you have in mind.

BTW, may I invite you over to https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/ where all the cool guys hand out :wink: The posts in the google group here is just a subset of the posts there!

<:-)