[benrbray]

It is just a personal wiki! Focusing on Obsidian, I think the appeal though is that it automatically creates a wiki from your personal notes. Just type [[wikilinks]] and everything else is done for you.

Maintaining a proper wiki by oneself is too much overhead, but Obsidian is a nice extra on top of standard markdown notes.

[ColinWright]

> It is just a personal wiki!

That's the vibe I'm getting from nearly everyone, and yet there are a few articles out there that say that the Zettelkasten absolutely was not simply a wiki. It was more.

I've found a few explicit statements to that effect, but, ironically, I can't find them just now, but Luhmann talked about "having a conversation" with his Zettelkasten. Simply implementing and/or using a wiki is clearly not the same thing ... that's a personal knowledge repository.

So I think people are still missing something.

[qznc]

This "having a conversation" is misleading because Luhmann uses a different definition than most people: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1146/communication-...

My understanding is that Zettelkasten is a way of using a wiki. One aspect is "small atomic notes/pages". Maybe you use your personal wiki that way, maybe you don't. Another aspect are "sequences of notes" (Folgezettel) but I'm not sure if that is a side effect of using a physical slip box or a useful concept.

Overall, it seems to be illusive like Agile. You will always find someone who claims you are doing it wrong.