I've used Obsidian for the Lonely Galaxy. I try to write up a topic there before posting it here or on the CBB. I also have a wiki that largely consists of polished (or not so polished) versions of those notes as well as forum posts I never bothered to document properly.

For conlanging I've been all over the place and back again. The grammar is easy enough. I just write in markdown. The lexicon is much harder because it needs to be searchable. I've tried Excel, Obsidian, TiddlyWiki, a JSON file, and currently a CSV file. I wish I could commit to one and stick with it but at this point I'm impressed I was able to preserve the lexicon through so many different formats.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I installed a mediawiki server. Took about 15 minutes, doing all my worldbuilding on the wiki now. Just add some article, link it to others, categorize stuff, use the built-in search engine to find stuff, add images and other media. Basically everything you need for organizing worldbuilding.

[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Never heard of this, but it does sound interesting. Is it remotely editable - as long as the host PC is on, can you sign in and edit it from anywhere? Or is it just an editing & organizing tool on the host machine?

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I added the Mediawiki engine on the home server, but I also have a synced copy of the engine on an RPi4, so we are not talking about big resources here.

Having it on the home server allows me to work on everything from my studio/office, but also from the living room PC. Theoretically I could access it remote, too, but I've set up the home server for in-house use only.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Not sure if you meant @Treczoks setup specifically, but in general Mediawiki runs like any other web application. You can register a domain and open ports on your router to make it available remotely. Mediawiki is what Wikipedia runs on so the experience is more or less the same as editing a Wikipedia article. It has a lot of stuff that's not strictly necessary for a single user environment like account management and email integration, but I can see it being useful if, like me, you like keeping track of how your ideas have evolved over time, since Mediawiki keeps track of article changes.

Other reasons I can see people picking it over Obsidian are ease of publication (just make it available as above) it's FOSS, which Obsidian is not, and you can allow others to collaborate with you. Obsidian puts easy remote access, publication, and collaboration behind a paywall.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Was it your intent to eventually make it public? Or was there something about mediawiki that made it attractive for personal notes? It's a bit of a chore for personal use compared to Obsidian, but I could see it being of interest for the version history.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

It was not about making it public. It was, for me, the easiest solution to get things organized. I can just start an article on an idea and save it, and linking between articles and therefore ideas is easy. I can also integrate whatever media I need.

One big plus is the ability to use redirects as aliases. E.g. if there is an entry "Orc", there is a redirect "Orcs"->"Orc", so I can easily use either form in the text to link to it.

And on top of it, it's free.