Would it be Sensible to Use Zotero to Index and Cross Reference a Wiki?

wagle

I have 2000+ page wiki. I use extensive bookmark tagging in Firefox to do a number of workflow tricks (scheduling, sorting, categories, etc). Sort of like a semantic web, but still very much a prototype. I'm trying to build my next generation organizer/planner, but I'm finding it very hard to imagine I can rely on Firefox to maintain my capability to do this after June 2018.

So three questions:

(1) Can Zotero maintain 10,000 tags to index, cross-reference, and workflow my wiki?

(2) Alternativelty, do you have any advice for running that indexing off board on my Wiki? Also, how might that wiki app interact with Zotero.

(3) What should be on my "must read list" to understand how to do this in Zotero?

The above is likely to seem unclear. I just now got serious about learning Zotero and seeing if I can rebuild my research environment with Zotero, and so my natural level of confusion is .. uh .. enhanced.

I welcome questions and calls for clarification. Thanks!

bwiernik

In the past, Zotero would start to have performance issues with that number of tags. I think that would still be the case (though the Zotero devs would be able to say more on that). Zotero also has a relatively limited set of tools for cataloging semantic relations/cross-references, etc. Also, Zotero's web page snapshot feature can generate quite large files, so you might be using a lot of space with 2000+ archived pages.

So, I'm not sure that Zotero will be the best tool for your use here. I'd recommend looking into more general content/qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) software, like NVivo or atlas.ti. You can save the pages of the wiki using tools that produce single-file archives, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive, or https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodijhokgodhhofbcjdecpffjipkle

wagle

Hi bwiernik --

Thanks for the pointers!

My wiki is a sort of combination organizer/planner/annotated-bibliography/research-journal. In those wiki pages, I can render pandoc markdown, graphviz, latex, etc. One thing it should have become is the (annotated) bookmark system for a web-browser, but that seems to not be the future of browsers.

Would I replace the wiki with Zotero (directly or indirectly with Zotero plugins)?

I don't need to snapshot the wiki pages. Probably should snapshot the URLs the wiki pages point to. (I had a notion of working in the intelligence somewhere to get bookmarks to track re-directions, etc, but .. browser.)

I'll get back to studying the Zotero Documentation and experimenting.

bwiernik

Let’s take a step back. What is your overall research goal here? What are you trying to accomplish?

wagle

I generally can't keep track of all the ideas flying around in my head, This is a serious problem. To remedy this, I have developed an "organizer", using wiki pages to hold "items". To sort through that all on a daily basis, I have developed workflows involving complex bookmark tags, SQL queries of those tags, and heavy continuous modifications to the tags to track where I am in the workflow.

Firefox's stability for this mission is nervewracking. I have no idea whether I can pull off a port of my tag query plugin (and API's to support it) in time (June 2018). Then I don't know if it would continue to be supported fro the rest of my life. Sometimes it seems like I could pull this off, and other times, I just really want to get off the foundation of now quicksand. The alternatives don't look much better, and have the "might go away at any time" problem too.

Zotero currently seems to be my leading alternative. Since it largely abandoned Firefox, I'm thinking that whatever it does and how it does it is worth investigating. So I wrote my first note from orbit (or 20,000 feet) to see if it seemed plausible that I could do some of what I had been doing by using Zotero or interfacing to it with plugins.

At this point, I'm thinking I should "land" (from orbit) by figuring out Zotero enough to ask reasonable questions instead of beating people up with my misunderstandings of it.

I do think my current workflow is very slow and clumsy, and I have half-baked ideas on how to improve it. I've been stuck in that coarse approximation for so long that it is hard to both think outside that box AND remember what I came up with.

adamsmith

If you're more interested in managing ideas & concepts than literature, I'm also not convinced Zotero is your best bet. Because it's principally designed to handle literature, it uses fairly strict categories and structures for organizing content -- great for literature, but often not sufficient to map ones ideas.

I'd also recommend looking at organization tools like DevonThink or the CAQDAS tools that bwiernik mentions.

wagle

Well, I was more imagining Zotero as a piece of a network of apps I assembled. One of the functions of my wiki is to do a sort of annotated bibliography, which I'm kinda doing by hand at the moment, and I want to automate it.

bwiernik

You can copy a link to an item in Zotero (the Zotero select links here). You could use a tool like DevonThink and then add a link to the Zotero item (and similarly add a link in Zotero to the other tool if possible).

wagle

Thanks!

rmenezess

@wagle , perhaps TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/) might be helpful in your workflow?