Wikimedia
Wikimedia is addicting. I just installed it in my laptop and I’ve been using it whenever I get the free time.
With the huge amount of information that I have had to digest lately, Wikimedia is a godsend for me. You see, I like taking notes (ya rly!). Unfortunately, there are times when I can be disorganized with my notes. I tend to write things down wherever I can - my “official” notebook, “unofficial” notebook, laptop notepad, desktop notepad, google notepad, email, pieces of paper, etc.
With such decentralized data, it can take some time for me to get the data that I need - if I ever find it. Wikimedia helps me by storing all my notes in one storage location. So what’s the difference between noting it in Wikimedia and writing it down in Microsoft Word / Open Office Writer / a single Notebook? Personally, the main selling point of Wikipedia is its ability to expose and organize unstructured data.
You can be organized at the atomic (article) level and leave it there to organize itself. Using links and references between articles, data organization will take care of itself. If you forgot where you placed your articles, you can use the search function which provides results that have relevance ratings. You can use tags and keywords to classify data. These metadata are the building blocks that business intelligence tools use to expose gathered data. In addition to that, data can also be accessed via networks - sharing the good stuff to others.
For people conscious with the concept of Knowledge Management Systems, knowledge captured in distributable media is like a Christmas Bonus multiplied by ten.
