I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
In grad school I was for a year part of a small study group. We shared notes, on paper and aloud. It made each of us far, far better at the subject than we could have been on our own. And we were at most 7 people (sometimes only 3).
When developing Hode[1], and when helping develop Semantic Synchrony[2], I imagined some kind of mind-meld utopia where superbeings would not just frolic in but also tend each others' knowledge gardens. (Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ... which I can't remember ...)
Reading nonlinearly is a faster way to accumulate knowledge than reading linearly. That's is why people who really care prefer newspapers to watching the news on TV. And a format that lets lots of people contribute their input can potentially convey more than a format that locks you into reading a single author. Alas, the potential for noise is higher too -- but still, this is why Wikipedia has been so wildly successful.
One might ask, "We've already got Wikipedia; what possible improvement on that do you see?" The thing about Wikipedia is it presents what the author(s) consider(s) settled knowledge. It is a place for record, not a place for debate. A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos. I once frolicked for an afternoon through Andy Matuschak's[4], which was quite enjoyable. But it was mostly about ... can you guess? ... how to build a knowledge base.
If someone finds a scheme that scales, I believe it could be much more powerful than what we currently call AI.
[1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode
[2] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/
[3] https://twitter.com/brandontoner
[4] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Knowledge_work_should_accret...
Is it #digitalgarden?
> I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links.
Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though.
> A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
I would love to see this implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol).
Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO.
> In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos.
5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive..
ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]).
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
[2] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners