Personal knowledge base

A personal knowledge base is not an archive of everything you have read. It is a set of your own notes, linked to each other, that you keep coming back to. Here is how to set one up so it works instead of turning into a dump of links.

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Three principles#

  1. In your own words. A quote without your explanation is useless a month later. An entry in the base is a thought you have understood and put into words yourself.
  2. One idea per note. Short notes are easy to link and reuse. A long document about everything at once links to nothing.
  3. Links matter more than folders. Folders give a rough structure; links between notes give the real one: which idea follows from which, where the example is, where the objection is.

A structure to start with#

  • Inbox/ — everything new, unsorted: excerpts, thoughts, links.
  • Notes/ — processed ideas, one file per idea.
  • Topics/ — overview pages for topics with links to the notes.
  • Projects/ — what you are working on now.
  • README.md — the table of contents and the rules of your base.

A regular review#

The base stays alive as long as you come back to it. Once a week, half an hour:

  • clear the "Inbox" — throw out what you do not need, rewrite the rest as notes;
  • add links from new notes to old ones;
  • update the topic overview pages.

Turning notes into questions and answering them from memory makes the base work for learning too — see active recall.

How to keep it on Skillok#

A private repository is a good home for a knowledge base. Notes are markdown files with [[Title]] links, #tag tags and callouts. You can write in the browser or in any editor on your computer, including Obsidian — the format is the same. Every edit is saved in the history: you see when an idea appeared and how it changed.

The base stays yours: download it as an archive or clone it with git at any time. If you want to share part of it, move that part into a public repository.

What not to expect#

There is no graph view of links in the browser, as in Obsidian. There is no search through the contents of all notes yet either — so good file names and topic overview pages matter more here than in apps with search. If you already use Obsidian, see the Obsidian alternative with sync.

Try it on your own task

Create a repository — history, issues and pull requests from day one.

Create a repository

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