Hello!
I’m trying to create a personal wiki for my work. I’m a teacher and my problem is that there are important procedures, rules and laws which I need to know once or twice a year. Like the correct way to add a student to the school system, to apply certain stuff to the data base, how to correctly do standardized tests and so on…
Usually I open my mail app and use search to find the right mail that tells me all I need to know. But it gets more and more complicated and so I thought about creating my own wiki to add stuff over time and to look up the stuff when I need it.
I also would love to share it with colleagues. So this feature would be nice to have. But it shouldn’t be some webpage because of data security and stuff.
Can anyone recommend software for this special use case?
Hooo boy did you come to the right place! Do a quick search for Craft, Notion, Obsidian, or DEVONthink. One of those would probably fit the bill. If you want an open source solution you could give Tiddlywiki a shot, depends on how technical you want to get.
Back in the day I would have pointed you at Circus Ponies Notebook or VoodooPad, but those are gone, or as good as gone. If you want to get really nerdy you could take a look at Emacs org-mode or Vim’s vimwiki plugin. Lots of options! What kind of app are you looking for?
You could do this with Notion. Then again, the need to share with colleagues adds a degree of complication— you’d need to play to the lowest common level of willingness to engage with tech. Having tried to use Notion with people who aren’t particularly excited about taking on platforms they’re not familiar with, it’s never quite as easy as sending them a link to a Notion page…
So maybe Craft.do instead?
Edit: @ibuys beat me to it. Plenty of good suggestions there.
This is the place to start. Since you want to share but keep it within your organisation the security will be taken care of by your existing platform. The issue of protecting the data doesn’t become your responsibility.
I’m not sure how Obsidian, for example, would share the data with others but in a non-public way.
Do they?
Is this it? Apparently Teams have a wiki as well.
I’ve been looking at creating a team wiki for use between me and my colleague - I’d been putting notes in to Obsidian for personal use, but want to expand that to a shared wiki to cover information on the buildings we look after. I was considering a Onenote file, but a wiki would probably be more preferable.
I agree with @geoffaire here, but not with the Wiki, I’d go with OneNote instead if you’re on Microsoft. You can share OneNote notebooks and you’ll find it invaluable for saving notes. (I loved OneNote until recently when I came out of Microsoft infrastructure - so handy for all those random things you need to save!) Set up tabs (exactly like real paper tabs) and sort your notes into categories. It does have a search function but for my brain at least I found it much quicker to just go to the tab where I knew the relevant notes were.
I don’t think you should try Notion given that you’re handling school data - you didn’t say but a couple of others have touched on the fact you likely have security or data concerns that you need to bear in mind when choosing where you store your info.
To complicate this, even more, SharePoint also have Pages. I would recommend creating Pages in SharePoint over the wiki tool. The wiki tool is antiquated and uses the old (horrible) SharePoint interface. Pages are also fairly easy to add as a tab in a Microsoft Teams channel.
A lot of apps want to occupy this space and will make claims of similar features, but its important to understand the teams behind them to know if you should expect updates, new features, ongoing support…
Notion recently raised nearly $300M in a funding round and has a $10B valuation. They’re in it to win it, and it’s shows from a user experience.
I’m a big fan of Craft for this kind of work. I have similar documents that I need to manage for teaching purposes and find it’s great at organizing them using a folder structure (no tags as of this time). Compared to some other PKM apps, Craft handles PDFs and other attachments well. Search is quick too.
Sharing with others is pretty easy - any note can be published online via a shareable link. It looks like this is going to be an area of focus for future development of the app.
The calendar function is also handy - all my meetings show up within Craft. You can launch a new note directly from any event listed. If it’s a virtual event the meeting link and attendee info automatically gets pulled into the note. Throw in a template for meetings and you can take minutes in a really efficient manner and then share them as needed.
Finally, Craft is free for students and teachers so you can try and see if it works out for you.
Sorry if that read like an advertisement - but I do find it quite useful! I tried several different apps this past year and finally settled on Craft.
