WikiAndAI

I wrote this to BillSeitz and BrianMarick on Mastodon :

Yeah. By definition hypertext optimises for writing rather than reading. It's low effort to capture stuff. But more work for a reader to find the threads through it.

You can "solve" that in various ways. You can require (of yourself or others) that they write more structured documents within the hypertext. Some of the best content on ThoughtStorms is my answers I copied over from Quora, because those are very focused on the reader and a specific question.

On the other hand they are hard to fit into wiki because they cross-cut so many other topics and themes which have individual pages.

If you put them on an existing page about one of those themes, they get lost. So it's better to give them a page by themselves. But then it's hard to find a good and intuitive name for that new page that sums up what they are about.

Ultimately, I think now that the most reader friendly medium is the chatbot. That lets the reader get exactly what they want through simple dialogue.

And the destiny of all our hypertext second brains is to become knowledge graphs to feed those chatbots.

But so far, the standard RAG techniques I've tried, don't produce very good results for wiki.

We need to figure out better ways for AIs to ingest wiki and understand the "argument by link" being made.

That involves us, as wiki people who like browsing and wandering within our digital gardens, to be a bit more self aware. To observe what we do as we navigate. And to think how we extract what we want.

Then we can put those ideas into RAG-from-wiki algorithms.

I've always dabbled with informally having "types" for links within ThoughtStorms. Just with informal extra words of syntax) My next phase of wiki (whether explicitly in code or just natural language convention ... though the distinction is disappearing) is to focus more on types of links. To push the hypertext more in the direction of a knowledge graph or argument mapping.

At the same time, to experiment with better algorithms or heuristics for AI to extract that information and become a viable chat front end.

I think it's going to be a good time for those of us who kept the personal wiki / hypertext faith. Wiki as shared artefact / communication channel between humans and AIs has a lot of potential.