My Personal Research Wiki.... IT IS BORN!!~

When I first started on my #homegradschooling journey, I remember coming across an article by a researcher (which for the life of me I can NOT find again), explaining why he loves using a personal wiki for his research, and he linked to his own. I loved the idea, but at the time I couldn't figure out how to use it for my own work.

This week, I realized that with my current research, a Wiki is a perfect way to organize the notes for my current research. So, I set out to build one!

 And it took me A. WHILE. (hours. Miserable, miserable hours!) to figure out how to make one (since I do not currently have webspace to simply host my own via MediaWiki). There was much googling, and much registering for sites that I poked around and now will probably never go back to, such as:

• Referata (Didn't have the infobox capability I needed)
• WikiSpaces (ditto above, also only was able to get a free wiki because I'm a teacher)
• ZohoWiki (Did allow for private wikis, but I don't think infoboxes)
• wiki-site.com -- I still am not sure if this one is even legit or not. Something seemed fishy for some reason, and I think it also didn't do infoboxes, so I didn't get much past registration.

But in the end, I went with the one I had actually heard of before, but never considered it as a possibility:

Wikia.com

I love it because:

• It allows Infoboxes!
• It's SO EASY to build infoboxes!
• It allows templates! Both *for* infoboxes, and for all aspects of each page!
• It's super easy to cite my sources 
• Other than the rather excessive pictoral links to other wikis on the bottom of the screen, it's by far the most attractive site of any other wiki I've ever seen.

It is, of course, not perfect.

• I wish it was easier to cite different pages from the same source without making totally new entries
• I wish it were easy to put a map into the infoboxes without having to screengrab/find/make a map elsewhere and then just put it in as an image.
• I wish I could make it private or members-only

But overall, I love it. 

Wiki advertises itself as a fandom wiki host/database, and while it is definitely that, it also invites personal Wikis, too. Best of all, not only does it ACTUALLY ALLOW INFOBOXES--- it has DRAG AND DROP Infobox builders!! I am so very grateful for not having to spend a ton of time trying to learn how to code stuff like that like you do on other wiki platforms. 

So beautiful ;__;

And I am nerding out to an incredible level about this so far. I have never before been so excited to type up notes and quotes! But seeing all this information coming together from all my disparate sources (I still don't know how the heck to organize paper research notes) is kinda thrilling, tbh. Especially since I really am finding so much more information on some of these people than seems to have been found and gathered by a single writer before me. Especially with Marie Stevens Case Howland, it feels like I'm the first person to ever see *all* of her life, and in context before. There's definitely something special about that for history lovers like myself.

I'm not sure if I'll ever show my research on this wiki (though when I'm done I'll definitely be transferring most of the information onto Wikipedia itself), but here, check out the size differences between Marie's Wikipedia page (left) and her barely half-done page on my wiki (right):

BAM. And actually I didn't even have any notes on Marie yet, but I was practicing with my wiki templates and just started working on her because one of my books was open to the chapter on her, and so then I went from there. And I still have managed this much so far, and I'm super excited about how it's turning out. I've been working on some other pages, including those for things I did have some notes on, and they're, obviously, even longer.

I spend so much time reading books and taking notes in pages that end up massively disorganized if not all together lost (ADHD will do that..), that my excitement is probably stemming from the fact that for once, the work I've been doing is VISUALIZED (and this is a big and important thing for ADHDers, for reasons I don't have time to explain atm). Suddenly, especially as an independent researcher, I feel SO much less like I've just been wasting time and accomplishing nothing but reading. I finally feel like the thing which in my head has been my project, can actually be recognized as "A PROJECT!" by others. My boyfriend is a fancy Ph.D. man, and even he is suddenly impressed. Feels good! 

But, I will tell you what. In all of my 30 years, I'm pretty sure that time has NEVER gone faster than it does when I'm excitedly working on this project. "i'm just going to work on this for a couple hour---OH NO HOW IS IT DINNER TIME ALREADY??!?!"

And honestly, that feels pretty good too. :)