Any wiki is basically an example, isn't it? Or if I'm not quite ready to defend that statement, I can at least say, you could use (or maybe misuse) any wiki-builder to build a Zettelkasten. Just impose a length restriction on each page's content.

But I don't know how much of the advantage of the Zettelkasten is tied to its being in the physical realm. On the one hand, the more physically rich an experience (of browsing or traversing or entering info for example), the more it will tend to stick in memory. On the other hand one of the things computers are good at is remembering indexes and linking them to other places where that index was mentioned.

Gordon Brander's pattern wiki is probably the best contemporary example I can think of that implements the Zettelkasten pattern: http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/

I think part of what can make the concept hard to see in practice, is that it's both the Zettelkasten artifact, and your methodology for adding and linking concepts when you're learning

I’ve kept a personal wiki since about 2007 for my notes on medicine and pathology. The “structure discovery” function it enables is very similar to Zettelkasten. I would submit the affordances of physicality can’t be replicated in software without AR.

I would like to understand why you think that, could you explain a bit why it cant be replicated?

Don't read my drivel, there's an authoritative book on this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

Exactly the same thing happened to me. I was reading hours into this topic and nobody was able to explain this topic in a convenient way. I even read the German sourced.

But there was one article standing out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

It is a wall of text too but the best explanation I've found yet.

"Getting Started": https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Trust me, I've read every page of Zettlelkasten.de. It's a nice site (and I like their software) but there is no fleshed out examples that I've seen on it.

Again, I get the concept, but I want to see examples in use.

Could you clarify what specifically you have questions about, and/or what docs are perhaps slightly better (or worse). Or documentation for other concepts you've found useful?

Regards Zettlekasten itself: the key notion to me is simply capture and reference. Those are the dual-natured heart of the system.

The rest is just mechanics. Important mechanics, in cases, but mechanics all the same.

Everything I’ve read on Zettelkasten has been the equivalent of trying to learn to program by reading a reference book. Sure, I could technically learn Python by reading an exhaustive list of methods, classes and operators, or I could pickup a book which explains key concepts through an example project and examines the syntax through a specific context.

I learn best by example, personally, and I’ve never seen good examples on this topic myself.

I think the point most guides overlook consists of the internal semantics of using a Zettelkasten, Luhmann essentially used it to create a paragraph (Zettel) & subchapter (Zettel Sequence, but note they of course sometimes he'd not manage to fit an entire paragraph on one Zettel due to margin limitations) branching & branchable, recursively self-referential choose your own adventure hypertextbook, from which he'd then generate regular textbooks. Hence why he said that his books basically wrote themselves — to write a book, he'd 'just' enter the Zettelkasten, and copy out everything he'd already written there on the topic, picking between branches & branchings as he went back, forth & side-to-side within it. Hence why if one looks close, one can find Luhmann seemingly self-plagiarising paragraphs from books he'd previously written. I suspect a similar mechanic sits behind the (in this sense very ignorant) accusations of self-plagiarism against Slavoj Zizek.

As such, one might wish to instead consider using Hypertext Fiction tools for creating a Zettelkasten, such these two (proprietary software, Mac OS X only, unfortunately):

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/

Note that there exists an EXTREMELY useful plugin for Tinderbox which implements Stretchtext:

https://natematias.com/stretchtext/

Now gimme a combination of what roamresearch.com does with the above, but using the data structure of Hode:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode

But with support for zzstructure like hyperthogonality:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/i...

And secretly use the patching patches feature of pijul.org in the background so version control actually becomes sanely doable, throw in elastic tab stop support, and maybe an entire kitchensink in which someone let a mixture of ChrysaLisp, SmallTalk, Hazel, Scala 3, /r/nosyntax, Inferno, RINA, GNUnet, & every single proof assistant and theorem prover sit for a tad bit long, and then MAYBE we can stop living in the dark ages of computing.

(Yes I'm bitter)

P.S.: Identity Transclusion ≠ Instance Transclusion

P.P.S.: Birth & Death of Javascript, anyone?

Tinderbox was something I paid for (and wanted to love) but it was just too bloated and buggy. The creator's stance on "artisan software" is intriguing, but frankly the software doesn't put him in a good light. I'm willing to pay good money for good software, but $180 for software that feels like it's an open source alpha project is annoying, especially software that is meant to contain massive amounts of connected data.

Thanks for the links! I'll check the rest out.

I sat in the same boat as OP and that page wasn't that helpful. It's starts backwards with

- How many of things I know nothing about should I have. - Don't use this aspect in the thing, use the other. …

And every article is a text wall of minutia addressing questions which are going to be relevant later on, but are just information overload if you try to understand What is it?

The page honestly reads like Hesse’s “description” of the glass-bead game: lots of things and no true explanation.

Thanks for your feedback, I'm still working on my writing skills :)

I was not trying to be snarky, it is just that one gets a feeling but no specifics.

I've had precisely your reaction, and am stoked to share my enthusiasm for Roam (https://roamresearch.com) -- a graph-based system for codex / memex / personal knowledge-base / zettelkasten++

I checked out Roam (thanks for the rec!) and though I REALLY love the concept, I'm a little nervous to keep a massive interconnected knowledge base with a SaaS. Currently, I use Devonthink and though it's not perfect, I'm just so relieved I can have data on my machine with the storage system I choose. I miss the days of software storing data on my computer or where I want.

As a backend engineer, I just think: "Man, this data is just sitting in a db somewhere for any engineer to grep." Until we get to a point where everything is just encrypted by default, I just can't see myself trusting software like this.

I've recently started using Roam, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Probably the easiest information capture and reference tool I've used to date--it makes it very simple to get things down without slowing you down. Only major downside so far is no mobile app, but I know they are working on one.

I'm trying to like it, but I keep running into bugs... and I haven't been able to find a point of contact on their web page to describe them.

But, yeah, when it works it's very nice indeed.

yeah it's super-early-days; they won't even take my money yet. import and export and mobile (and hopefully encryption at rest) are all coming

Tbh, I haven't seen a real-life example that perfectly clones this method but I've adopted parts of the system that makes sense for my own workflow. I think that's how it should be approached. Luhmann developed this in a non-digital world after all.

Yes I agree to this. It has some very nice concepts which can be adopted to a software solution, but he designed it for his personal use.

Here's an article by someone using a similar system where I think how it's actually used in practice is described pretty well: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-bo...

That is interesting; here’s another from Ryan Holiday that goes deeper:

https://forge.medium.com/the-incredible-creative-power-of-th...

This kind of method used to be very common among scholars, before computers.

You can probably still find some in use among retired professors who started their careers 60 years ago and already had a system in place when computers started to replace physical organization systems.

Nowadays there are still many people who use digital equivalents.

Have you looked at the original? Luhmann Original Zettelkasten was scannend and is online available. Though, it's all german.

Tutorial: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhalt... Zettel 1: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel...

I used to assign a short piece by Luhmann on how to read that describes his note-taking technique with some concrete examples.

At the time I used my own translation (based on the text in Short Cuts published by Zweitausendeins), but I see somebody else has now translated (most of) it here: https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learni...

I think the internet as such was thought of linked document, which comes very close to that concept

ha, yeah very muich in the same boat. been following some of the zettel blogs for years and have read an ungodly number of posts, but it still hasn't entirely clicked — that said, I've moved entirely to plain text for note-taking and it's been a godsend moving out of evernote.