this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Worldbuilding

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How do you document your worldbuilding? What tools do you use? How do you organize your ideas?

Since the inception of my current conworld I have been using Obsidian. It's great for non-linear note taking. The downside is that the result is less shareable (unless you pay for sync).

I've always wanted to create a publicly viewable wiki. I LOVE digging through fan wikis, even for franchises I'm otherwise unattached to. All my knowledge of D&D and WH40K comes from walking through various fan wikis.

To that end, I've been exploring other options. Mediawiki seems to be the gold standard since it's what Wikipedia uses. However, its designed with a lot of user management and permissions features that work well for a massive user base, but are less relevant to someone who wants a non-linear read-only browseable repository of info.

Dokuwiki looks like a popular alternative. No database to manage, though the fact that a lot of expected features like tags and moving pages have been relegated to 3rd party plugins isn't great. The more plugins, the harder patch management becomes.

Tiddlywiki so far looks the most promising. It assumes only one user is editing pages, so no user permissions to manage. It also runs as a single monolithic HTML file, which has upsides and downsides, but that means I can upload that single file to a simple free web host like Neocities. If the wiki gets very large I anticipate performance issues, as the entire wiki is sent when the page is requested and everything runs client side, so the more I add the worse it will feel. But it's very stable, has been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself, and unlike Obsidian is open source.

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[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago

I just use LibreOffice Writer for odt, Folio (Linux) and Print Notes (Android) for markdown, and Syncthing to sync between my devices. If I need to share it with others, I either copy a specific file or just share the zipped root folder.