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Oh, so it's just a hipsterish new name for a personal wiki.


Kind of, yes, but from my understanding of the original system as devised/practised by Luhmann was that the real value of it laid in the connections between the individual notes and the work of actually filing things away in that web of knowledge.

It's trivial to just write everything interesting down in whatever format, but the idea behind Zettelkasten is that by examining each piece of information before slotting it into its proper place in the grand scheme of things made you re-evaluate old notes and consider how things fit together as a whole. This aided memory and improved understanding of the topics.

My gut feeling says the concept is sound. You're not just archiving information, you're piecing together a complex web of knowledge and relating new information to what you already know, which in turn might spur original thought. That might happen with a wiki, but it's not a given.

(It also pre-dates the concept of a wiki ;P)




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