Talk:Personal knowledge base

Examples

The list of examples in this article is, and always has been, a list of PKB apps from Davies et al. 2005. Recently various editors have tried to add a certain currently popular software app to the list, but this app doesn't fit in the historical nature of the list, and it is also unnecessary because the aforementioned software app is also listed in the pages Personal wiki and List of wiki software § Personal wiki software, which are both listed in the "See also" section. Biogeographist (talk) 14:30, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Your insistence on the list being historical is confusing. The point of examples is to contextualize concepts with things the reader already knows. Obsidian is the only one of these examples I had prior knowledge of. Additionally, your conduct with regards to this list is troubling, as the list remaining historical appears to contravene consensus. As you singularly have reverted myself, @Rene Rekers, @Dinsm8re, @Gracchus123, @KarateHare, @GayaniGojo, @Spoc-Web, @MtPenguinMonster, @Riot starter, and @Aillile for changing this list. I would like to remind you that edit warring is not only the 3 revert rule, but instead any protracted reversion of legitimate changes for the purpose of changing disputed content.   MetalBreaksAndBends   (talk) (contribs) 02:51, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

@MetalBreaksAndBends: What I'm against is inserting Obsidian into a list that is otherwise a historical list based on Davies 2005. In response to your insistence, I've changed the text explanation so that it can include any relevant software, and I've expanded the list so that the addition of Obsidian makes sense among other relevant recent software. In this context, the addition of Obsidian makes sense, but it certainly did not before, which is why I reverted its addition so many times over the years. If anyone had pushed back like you did, I would have made this expansion of the list in response earlier, but nobody did. (That's not edit warring. It's rational page maintenance. The addition of a single incongruous list item by multiple editors over the course of years for no good reason is not justified simply because multiple people made the same mistake.) The advantage of the previous list is that all the items in the list were clearly justified by one excellent scholarly source; now the list is an unreferenced free-for-all. That change is not an improvement according to the WP:VERIFIABILITY policy ("Wikipedia's content is determined by published information rather than editors' beliefs, experiences, or previously unpublished ideas or information"). I do rather like the larger list, though it has the aforementioned weakness in relation to Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Biogeographist (talk) 04:01, 23 February 2026 (UTC) & 15:30, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

From looking at the history of this talk page, it seems likely that the reason that nobody had pushed back is because they didn't know of the reversion, as none of them had been pinged. Additionally, the exemptions to edit warring does not include the reversion of content you consider to be improperly justified. The final 2 sentences of the policy on edit warring should be noted, as they state

An editor who repeatedly restores their preferred version is edit warring, regardless of whether those edits are justifiable. Claiming "My edits were right, so it wasn't edit warring" is not a valid defense.

  MetalBreaksAndBends   (talk) (contribs) 16:15, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Sometimes editors were pinged, sometimes not, so the fact that some were not pinged is not likely "the reason". I don't know what their reasons were, and I consider it unlikely that there was only one reason, but we don't know because they never said. Your quoted sentences are at the end of the first paragraph of WP:EDITWAR, and should be interpreted in relation to the first sentence of the paragraph: "An edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions." I would not say that the various editors who added Obsidian to the list over the years were engaged enough to be called "repeatedly overriding each other's contributions", so I do not agree that there was edit warring happening here. I support consensus through discussion, but that requires that editors be engaged enough to care, coming to the talk page and giving their reasons. Biogeographist (talk) 16:46, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for explicitly pinging me and the other Users above. I am an infrequent Editor, partly because the articles usually have more Information than I can contribute. I edit only when I am certain about my information and when I feel it would help others to find them in this place.

I am also regularly frustrated of such changes being redacted, so this notification reactivated me a bit.

I don't monitor my edits anymore to save me from such frustration.

I know there are super diligent editors and maintainers and I also know there are edit wars and vandalism. But I hope that there is also a niche for less engaged contributors that nonetheless increase the quality over time...

In this case people try to get an Orientation about PKM and the available tools. A 20 year old List of Software may be of historic Interest to some, but not the majority of Users IMHO.

Spoc-Web (talk) 20:49, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

@Spoc-Web: A few thoughts: First, you were already pinged when I reverted your relevant edit. (But even when you are not pinged, it's good to pay attention to pages that you edit, if you care about them, in my opinion.) Second, you did not cite a source, so your contribution (and every other edit like it) was original research, and so a revert was justified purely on the policy ground of WP:NOR, in addition to the issue that the edit did not fit into the historical scope of the list, which was based on Davies 2005 cited in the article, as explained above.

I don't think that this article could ever be a good source of information about available tools, for at least a couple of reasons: First, because that's not really what Wikipedia is for (WP:NOTDIRECTORY); there are other websites that specialize in that purpose (see, for example, the page about this topic on SaaSHub). Second, because a personal knowledge base can be built with an ever-expanding array of kinds of software, as could be seen already in Davies 2005; more recently, for example, here is a forum discussion about using Zotero as a personal knowledge base, even though Zotero is classified as reference management software (which is often considered a companion tool to a PKB), and many people create their own software for their personal knowledge base, as can be seen in this topic (and other similar topics) on GitHub, and it's not Wikipedia's job to list every relevant GitHub repository (WP:NOTDIRECTORY again). So any software list in this article will need to be very limited in comparison to what is available. Biogeographist (talk) 23:22, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Linking to someone's username in an edit summary doesn't ping them.   MetalBreaksAndBends   (talk) (contribs) 00:33, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Strange, I was pinged when you reverted me. I thought that always happened if an editor is mentioned in an edit summary; if not, that's just another reason to pay attention to the pages you edit. Biogeographist (talk) 00:54, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Article subject not consistent

The lede opens by defining PKBs as software tools, but the rest of the article has "PKB" refer to the system that would be created by said software, or by something else entirely. Kaotao (talk) 21:40, 14 June 2026 (UTC)