Why You Should Create a Personal Wiki, start there.The journey of creating a Wiki begins with understanding why you want to create one in the first place. For me, it was the desire to contribute knowledge to the public domain without expecting an immediate return. Over time, a Wiki compounds in value, answering questions for you and saving your time from repeating answers. It is, essentially, a tool that captures your knowledge in a manner that is easily updatable, reflecting your best insights at all times.
Choosing the Right Platforms
When it comes to choosing a platform for creating your Wiki, there are many options available. However, for this guide, I am going to talk about two primary tools: Notion and Super.so.
Notion
Notion allows you to create pages with infinitely nested subpages, similar to a typical URL structure. For instance, if I have a homepage named garrison.com, I can create nested pages like garrison.com/guides, or even further like johndoe.com/guides/culture. The caveat is, while using Notion, the URLs won't be as clean. But it's a great starting point for anyone looking to create a Wiki.
Super.so
Super.so is an excellent tool to create a pleasant wrapping for your Notion pages, giving you the flexibility to create custom URL structures. It's what I use for wiki.garysheng.com (which I recommend you to explore firsthand).
The main skills you want to learn for Super.so are…
- Customizing the style of your website (e.g. font, colors, spacing of blocks etc.)
- Adding a custom domain (like wiki.garysheng.com)
- Renaming the URLs of different pages (so they look nice, like “https://wiki.garysheng.com/docs/recs/music/afrobeatmixes”)
- Making sure Google indexes your Super.so site
I’d appreciate if you sign up that you sign up via this referral link so I get credit in my account if you upgrade your account 🙏
Documenting Your Knowledge
What do you know? If you're reading this, you have a lot to share.
- Like my friend Johnny who understands the power of social media, memes, Gen Z, Solarpunk, and viral media campaigns.
- Or my friend Marcus, who could share about Christ, crisis management, black culture, trauma, or how to pray. These are all nuggets of knowledge that can be documented into a Wiki.
Getting Started
Are there downsides to documenting your knowledge? Unless you're sharing proprietary codes, not really. In fact, it might bring you more clients than you might lose, demonstrating your profound knowledge on a subject.
To get started, you need to ask yourself: What are you good at?
- For instance, Johnny could create posts like "Why social media matters" or "How to create a viral media campaign". He could share his insights about Marfa or create a guide to LA. These documents will be helpful to the public, benefiting Johnny's brand in the process.
- Similarly, Marcus could write about why prayer may be healing or how to help someone in a tough time. These are all valuable pieces of information that could make a difference in someone's life.
Transcribing Your Thoughts
A great way to get your thoughts out of your head is to dictate them. I recommend using Descript, which transcribes your thoughts into text, which can then be grammatically fixed by ChatGPT. ChatGPT will create an initial structure for each your Wiki entries.
Conclusion
Documenting your knowledge into a Wiki can be incredibly rewarding. As you offload your knowledge into this 'second brain', it frees up your cognitive bandwidth for new thoughts and creative endeavors. I've never been in a more flow state than when I started blogging and creating my Wiki.
I sincerely hope you find this guide useful and that it encourages you to embark on your own journey of creating a Wiki.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Further reading: Gary’s Guides on Writing & Communication