A personal knowledge base is a knowledge base which organizes all your personal knowledge. A knowledge base is like a database. E.g. it could be a Wiki. Or text files.
A personal knowledge base can really cover everything, like fact knowledge what you learned in school / university / research. It could also be random ideas / thoughts.
You can extend on that, and it could also contain written documents, code, and other media such as pictures. At some point, part of it should maybe be public, while most of it should be private, so it needs an access-control list. In any case, being able to hyperlink between items is important.
It might make sense to have certain parts organized in separate software (e.g. some picture management tool, some backup software, ...) but the distinction can become blury at the edges, and makes hyperlinking harder, and ultimatively will probably make the organization worse.
This document is mostly about how to organize that. Such as via a Wiki software.
Some of these solutions only cover some parts of what would make a useful personal knowledge base.
- This wiki here. (Mostly useful for public text.)
- I keep lots of knowledge in my
~/Documentsdirectory. This directory consists mostly of txt files. It is versioned under Git, and kept in sync accross many computers. Basically this is all the private part of my personal knowledge base. Once I want to make sth public, I could move it to this wiki. - My mail archive. I sent mails to myself with small random notes or weblinks. Then I tag them and archive them. Important is a good search function. (I use GMail.)
- Online notes (like Google Keep).
- Online documents (like Google Docs).
- Shell history, per directory.
- Error DB (Only for collected error messages.)
- Personal assistent (A software to organize the knowledge base, and also to make it more useful by giving you context relevant information.)
- nvALT software (GitHub) for text notes (article: Organizing Everything With Plain Text Notes)
- Mobile editors (e.g. Orgzly) together with Dropbox/Syncthing
- Backup software (this wiki entry, other project) (For any kind of media.) (Also just for keeping them synchronized.)
- Emacs Org Mode (HN). This is probably the most well known tool to organize sth like this, including also TODO lists, getting things done (GTD) stuff, etc. It requires that you know Emacs.
- Backup software
- TODO lists. Getting things done (GTD). Organize how long some task takes, its deadlines, etc.
- Calendar (covering deadlines of tasks)
- Zettelkästen (HN, blog)
- beepb00p: personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code (HN)
- beepb00p: Exobrain: Exobrain, or "second brain", or "brain dump" is something like public wiki where you can keep your notes, ideas and thoughts.
- Kasper Zutterman: A curated list of awesome Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱
- Today I Learned (TIL): jbranchaud (HN), Simon Willison (HN)
- RWX.GG Progressive Knowledge App
- VimWiki - Personal Wiki for Vim (HN). Number of linked text files that have their own syntax highlighting.
- Wikipedia. Collective community effort for a knowledge base (not personal).
- Johnny Decimal (HN): A system to organise projects. Organization on the file system, to search and find things.
- Stephen Wolfram: Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
- Everything I Know – Wiki - Nikita Voloboev (GitHub, HN)
nbis a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application- Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research