Ehh... Why I didn't think of those things but here we are. They are going to stay for a little while. Also, there's a slight shift in how I want use my wiki now. Instead of trying to craft every note into a set of evergreen notes. While Andy Matuschak's notes are very practical, it also focuses too much on crafting evergreen notes (a bit too much). Or maybe that was just my impression? Either way, I'll let some of my thoughts to drift if it able to link somewhere in the notes. I think I'm getting the point of Luhmann's original use of Zettelkasten as a research partner.
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Digital gardens
An environment for crafting Evergreen notes. Unlike a traditional blog where it concerns the final output, a digital garden cares more on the process of creating notes even if it's incomplete. Examples of a digital garden includes Andy Matuschak's, Maggie Appleton's, and Anne-Laure De Cunff's.
In other words, wikis with a fancier name and a gardening metaphor.
However, it does come with a different mindset. The culture emphasizes to Start small and improve later, just like how you tend your own garden. It focuses on the growth of your notes to the point of naming the states of progress. First, your notes will start as a seedling, then grow as you develop more insight, it will turn into a budding note, and eventually develop into an evergreen note.
Digital gardens also makes an additional point on creating a web thoughts, making them Non-linear notes with associations.
While digital gardens are essentially glorified personal knowledge bases, digital gardens are usually seen with the following features.
- An interface focusing on freely referencing other notes. Usually, this comes in the form of Backlinks.
- Composes of different notes of different maturity level: either an incomplete seedling of a note, a partially complete note, or a fully-developed evergreen note.
- Sports a note-taking workflow along with a publication workflow (e.g., web, PDf documents), encouraging to work in the open.