What is Reddit's opinion of
wikidPad?
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➔ wikidPad website
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48 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
If anyone wants a fast, lightweight, offline version of a wiki for their worldbuilding, I recommend wikidpad. It has let me focus more on content than formatting articles or web page maintenance, and I've managed to get about 170 articles in it so far.
I do remember! That was fun.
I have them all written down. Currently, I use a wiki--find it here--to keep track of all of it.
The magic systems in cosmere books all conform to a few underlying rules. This came from my interest in physics, and its search for a 'unifying' theory. (Fascinating reading, if you haven't studied this.)
In my books, there is a unifying theory of magic, so to speak.
--Edit, formatting.
I've heard several recommendations for WikidPad, and here are some others.
Also, Scrivener makes use of hyperlinks to other documents, and it's pretty intuitive. It's a great writing program, and it could be nice to have it all in one place (e.g. linking to your wiki pages within your work in progress). The best part of Scrivener is that ALL your documents are kept in one, easily-to-navigate window. It has a free month trial to test it out.
I'm fairly certain this is the one Brandon/Dan uses. Their episode on tools for a writer mentions it in the notes.
WikiPad is a good one. Link It's a little old but it also will serve as a good introduction to Wikispeak which is good to know if you ever want to put your wiki online.
Another and much more complex option is to use the Mediawiki software, the same one they use for wikipedia. You can do that either offline or online. The downside is that it will take awhile to learn to use. The upside is that you can do pretty much anything you can imagine. I was able to get a wiki up and running and I have limited html/programming knowledge. Luckily there are lots of resources online to help out.
It may help to move as much of your data as possible to a single device (just a computer as opposed to both computer and notebooks).
If you're looking to cut down on the number of notepad documents you've got, then WikidPad might be worth your time.
[](/ajhappy)You could still do something out of that worldbuilding though: a D&D campaign, perhaps! Or maybe not go for writing a fic but doing a video/audiobook-esque series. And according to World Anvil, you can even monetize your world though I'm not sure how one would do that.
[](/sp)
[](/ajsly)I guess we're wildly different then when it comes to worldbuilding. Though I haven't done much serious worldbuilding for my fics myself, I have toyed with the option of getting worldbuilding programs. For a Euorpa Universalis IV mod I was making (and then gave up on after half a week), I got a program that enabled me to make my own wiki. (Ah, it was WikidPad.) And if and when I have to worldbuild for a story, I tend to talk to someone else to at least be a soundboard for my ideas—I myself am biased towards my own world, so a pair of outside eyes early on will do well in making sure a story remains consistent.
Have you tried WikiPad? It's bassically an offline wiki, so you don't have to worry, that someone would see your world at its "unimpressive state". I recently started organizing my world with it and I have to say, that it does much better job than Word.
I'm rather big on WikidPad, which is essentially an outliner that allows you to use WikiWords to cross-link articles together. You can also set different page attributes as well, which I use to sort pages into categories.
I've used WikidPad (http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/) for a while and loved the whole idea of it. However I kept falling into the trap of trying to come up with clever links, so it became more about grooming my wiki than filling it with actual content...
I'll take a look at ZIM, thanks for sharing!
I used it for a bit and really liked it. I found myself filling in tons of information about my world, and I will likely pick it up again when doing some world building for my fantasy. It's simple and easy to use, if a bit bare; it feels a little dated.
It's a bit unwieldy if you're trying to move the saves from computer to computer, but if you only use one computer to write it should be fine.
Learning the hotkeys is important. As I'm typing up information on something, I'll make links to fill in as I'm going. Then I'll pick them up at a later time and fill in information there, and on down the rabbit hole. It's almost addicting.
I recommend checking it out. It's free. Here's what it looks like, and here's the download.
You could create something like a wiki, where you can write about lots of different things and link them together, categorize them to death and still manage to read it :D
I use Wikidpad. It's a bit like Notepad, but with some simple Wiki-esque features like Wikiwords and hyperlinking and such. I use it to organize a Dark Heresy campaign, and it does the job nicely.
If you just need a neat note taking desktop app see Wikidpad, it is the most flexible notetaking app in my view. There used to be a mobile app too but never used it.
Here is how I did it in 3 ways.
>Sort each item alphabetically like an encyclopedia.
>Sort each item by subject.
>>Upgrade to a wiki.
>Use a document generator. The good features are not free. But it formats a text file for you and it its really nice.
>>Upgrade to programming your own document generator. Which I have done for myself as least 3 times for seperate projects. However, devolve to just using a wiki.
Therefore, what I am trying to say is just use a wiki. If you use a site that supports mediawiki, and there are many free ones that do. You can download offline backups. Just in case you need to put all of information on another service.
There is also freeware like wikidpad, which creates a database offline. Like your own personal wiki on the desktop.
So that's a pretty broad request, so kind of grabbing and starting with area 8:
I can't really tell if your rivers are backwards, but they might be backwards. They find a the path of least resistance to flow down to the sea, meaning they shouldn't break as they get closer to the sea, they should combine into larger rivers that lead to the sea.
Glancing briefly over your cities and areas, I think you have a good start where the places and have a summary of the type of area, special notes of interest, and give you some backbone to improv off of.
I don't think I saw anything about scale or travelling. Depending on the type of campaign you run, travelling and/or passage of time may be important (it is in mind because I run world narratives independent of PC actions unless the PCs engage with that world narrative and alter its course, so if they go a length of time not dealing with something, it progresses). If it's relevant, so long as you keep travel distance/time consistent, it's all good. This comment is more food for thought.
With this type of setup, I think you might be able to benefit from WikidPad. It's a slightly learning curve, but it basically lets you make a wiki where you can get as creative as you want in making a page, adding images, formatting, etc.. I generally keep it simple with my homebrew world and stick with text and hyperlinks. It basically let's you have the huge amount of text documents you're going to end up having, but organizes them in a wiki format so you can have tabs for multiple pages, hope between pages easily, and do searches through all of them for pages that reference what you're searching.
Seconded for Scrivener. I use it myself, OP, and I'm doing the same interconnected universe thing as you. Scrivener also allows insertion of stuff like images and Excel sheets so you can quickly reference them.
Something I used a while back, too, was Wikipad (http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/). You can set up your documents like a wiki and it has an auto-linking feature for your pages (so when you type a term in a paragraph, it auto-links to that term's page if it has one).
Have you tried WikiPad? It's bassically an offline wiki, so you don't have to worry, that someone would see your world at its "unimpressive state". I recently started organizing my world with it and I have to say, that it does much better job than Word.
My favorite tool to use, it is really easy to use and is offline. You can have multiple wikis and the markup code is really simple to use. Mediawiki is tough to set up in my opinion and not much worth the effort for me.
I use WIKIDPAD which is basically an offline wiki. I have it save the content to my google drive folder so I can access it from any computer. It is fantastic, BUT it does have a steep learning curve, however after I learned how to use it I fell in love and wished I had found it years ago when I started making notes about my world(currently moving my notes to wiki a piece at a time). I have my wiki separate locations, factions, people, powers, technology..etc and can link any part of my wiki to another part with ease. Although my absolute favorite thing is that now I have my assets separated, whenever I have an idea I want to jot down on a person, place, idea..etc. I go into the wiki and find the relative subject and just make a note at the bottom of the page to go back to later. Before I just wrote notes on text document and it was all a mess of random ideas, now those ideas are neatly organized.
It is not perfect, the deep learning curve and it is not a polished program are definitely negatives. However I have tried other programs and nothing comes close to the ease of sorting my stuff and linking stuff together like wikidpad. When I am away from a desktop PC still have to take notes on my phone (I use google docs so I can access anywhere), but when I get home I transfer it to my wikidpad files.
Thanks, I seen some software called wikidpad in another thread I think that will be good for me to have a few files on the go.
The more I write the more I will understand my way of working, just need to keep going :)
I prefer DokuWiki to MediaWiki (though MediaWiki is what Wikipedia uses). There are other options too - investigate! If you don't have a web server to set up an instance, you can look into personal wiki software like Wikidpad, or a hosted wiki website (you have to search for this one - I used to recommend PBwiki but it apparently shut down).
I've used a program called wikidpad. It is a program that helps you keep track of a large worldbuilding project as a wiki. It's definitely best for really big projects.
I was going to propose a wiki but figured somebody would've suggested it. :D
However, I frequently (read : 100% of the time) GM in places without wifi access so I needed an offline, single-user wiki and found Wikidpad. It's a bit quirky and the docs are so-so but it does the job right.
wikidpad: It's a wiki-like program that lets you write and organize people, plots, word, etc. It's good for world building and keeping everything organized and connected.
When it comes to organization I would recommend using a wiki tool.
The interlinked articles in a wiki is super useful to build a web of information and help you not lose track of important details.
Wikidpad is a great free desktop tool.
ChronoGrapher is a webtool for worldbuilders, writers and game masters.
It allows you to structure and format your text and images just like any of the major wiki engines out there, with some additional automation features.
It's private, and you own your own data, storing it in google drive.
If, and when you want to, you can share your working folder with friends and collaborate.
If your work is not published its very likely to be removed by a mod on Wikipedia, but when it comes to organizing your world, a personal wiki is by far the best way to do so.
There are lots of tools out there, both free and premium.
I would recommend doing some research on all of the suggestions in this thread and find what works for you.
Wikidpad is a free desktop wiki that's super handy when you just want to write down your world.
I made ChronoGrapher because I wanted some more worldbuilding specific features, like interactive maps and timeline support.
When it comes to organization I would recommend using a wiki tool.
The interlinked articles in a wiki is super useful to build a web of information and help you not lose track of important details.
Wikidpad is a great free desktop tool.
ChronoGrapher is a webtool for worldbuilders, writers and game masters.
It allows you to structure and format your text and images just like any of the major wiki engines out there, with some additional automation features.
It's private, and you own your own data, storing it in google drive.
If, and when you want to, you can share your working folder with friends and collaborate.
Are you sure you need something complex? Why not have a Word doc with headers set up (the Navigation Pane will display all your headers, so you can navigate by clicking on it). Google Docs or Open Office likely has something similar.
If you do want something more sophisticated, you may want to look into a desktop Wiki of some sort. (WikidPad)[http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net] is free, open source, and runs on your computer (I assume you don't want this the contents exposed online).
ChronoGrapher is a worldbuilding webtool with all of the features you mentioned, but it is tied to patreon.
Wikidpad is a great private wiki tool, but I don't know if its supported for ios, and its missing some features you wanted.
For organizing lore and information, a wiki is in my opinion the best way.
You can use a wiki tool as a notepad at first, and always go back end reorganize the article later if you want.
Its also very easy to link and group information together.
Wikidpad is a great free resource for this, the only downside is that's its an offline tool and its lacking image support.
Because of these limitations, and because I wanted map and time/chronology support integrated with the wiki, I created my own tool, ChronoGrapher.
There's no private wiki functionality on wikia/fandom.
Author Brandon Sanderson's team uses WikidPad to organise an internal wiki. You can see an example of this in action on his livestream timestamp 1hr 12m 45s https://youtu.be/lKmGmPsIjNQ
I've used Dropbox paper for this for rpgs amongst friends and it's worked well
I use TiddlyWiki for everything writing-related. It basically lets you easily make your own personal wiki with links and tags and whatever. It's made my life so much easier. You can tag different "tiddlers" (wiki pages) with whatever WiP or "random" or whatever organization scheme you want, easily link between entries or outside URLs, etc. It's also open-source if that's something you care about.
I've heard a few writers use Wikidpad (for example Brandon Sanderson) but that seems a little more complicated to me. Tiddlywiki is really easy to use.
I'm approaching one year into a homebrew campaign I'm running for friends with a custom world and plot.
For pretty much everything text/info-based I used Wikidpad. It's a little bit of a learning curve, but it basically gives you a simple wiki-styled place to keep track of things and link between pages for organization. For maps, I do hand-drawn and scanned maps recently decided to spend the $20 a year for the pro version of Inkarnate. And then I generally use word documents for upcoming bits before the information moves into the wiki.
The way I've been handling the world-building and presenting the campaign to my players started with building some broad world-building strokes and then needling in on those small details around areas where the players are at, and then, using video game terminology, render the immediate area around them, and to a lesser extent the areas around that. And then by letting them sort of work things out, I figure out where they're looking to go and flesh out that stuff more. So the stuff they've generally been around has a lot of details and flesh compared to stuff in adjacent kingdoms where I know some general history, the geography, etc.., but haven't spent the hours working up all of that. Depending on how ambitious you plan on being, I'd advise doing this type of approach of work on staying ahead of the players, but don't kill yourself to have everything available and spend 10 years making a world prior to letting people play around in it.
I personally don't like Tiddlywiki, so I welcome other attempts.
My current note-taking wiki of choice is wikidpad. Works well on Windows, but I wasn't completely satisfied when I tried it out on a mac.
This is a neat project. But to avoid reinventing the wheel, have you looked at existing products that do similar things already? It'd be great to have some kind of plugin to add some of the requested functionality to them. I've variously used WikdPad for offline wiki, Microsoft OneNote for cloud + offline sync, and [Obsidian Portal](www.obsidianportal.com) for public facing online wiki. For instance, it'd be great to have some of these other handy features integrated into WikidPad, which is open source and provides a lot of "wiki-like" capabilities, and to give it some sort of online publishing ability to Obsidian Portal.
I have a wiki on my website for campaign design and tracking, because you can just link everything. You could also set up a small local webserver and put a wiki on that. A quick Google reveals this tutorial, but there are probably even better resources out there.
If that doesn't sound like the type of journey you want to embark on, there are several wiki(-like) programs that might fill your need. WikidPad or Zim might suit you.
There are also programs like OneNote (which is part of MS Office) and services like [Evernote](evernote.com) that might be up your alley as well.
NB I have assumed Windows simply because of numbers. If you are a Mac or Linux person, all of these options still exist, but the links would change slightly.
I'm going to second the benefits of having some sort of wiki or outliner for taking notes in. I've been using WikidPad a lot lately for my own project, making a page for each big concept and then cross-linking among them, which really helps for making sure everything meshes well when it's all connected.
I use wikidpad for general stuff alongside writing regular notes for selling. It's pretty light weight, but I think you can do a portable install and there's some add-ons.
Wikidpad is a good personnal wiki notepad, but as for sharing it is lacking a bit. You could export the pages to HTML (the program is designed for that) and send the bunch of files to those interested. If you ever get some website (free or not) you could host the pages on it.
It's quite an interesting program. You write your stuff. If you want to create a page, you simply [surround it] with brackets or write in a CamelCase manner. It becomes a black link that you can double click to get to the newly-created page.
To visualize the final result, you CTRL-SHIFT-SPACE and you get the results.
You can also import images and set links to files or websites.
> Out of curiosity which NES emulator would you recommend for its debugging capabilities?
It's been a while since I did any ROM hacking at all actually, and I seem to remember that a lot of the old tools were 16 bit and therefore incompatible with 64 bit flavours of Windows. FCEUd was awesome back then and my go-to debugging emulator of choice, and FCEUX looks to be the modern equivalent.
> Out of curiosity what are you using for personal wiki software?
For ROM hacking I use WikidPad as it allows for multiple wikis, is extremely quick to use and doesn't concern itself with making everything look nice. I also use Ema Personal Wiki as it has apps for Windows and Android and allows you to keep your information synced via Dropbox, but I tend to use that mostly for other things. WikidPad feels like you're jotting notes into Notepad, but has the advantage of allowing you to organise your notes by creating links to new and existing pages on the fly.
> Do you find yourself running out of space on the ROMs often?
All of the time. I've never actually released a hack, because I feel that either the change that I made didn't really have as much of an effect as I thought it would (ie, the hack itself was a bit small and uninteresting) or the change that I want to make can't be written into the space that is available. It's a fun hobby though and I never regret the time spent chasing an outcome even if it doesn't work out in the end.
Ninja edit: Corrected FCEU to FCEUd, which was the version with a built-in debugger.
I don't have any advice for PC, but for Mac, VooDooPad is by far the best option that I've found. I've tried notebooks, Evernote, even LaTeX (for hyperlinks), and VooDooPad beats all of them hands down. It allows you to easily make wiki style hyperlinks between points and pages in your documents. It's a little light on the formatting, but otherwise an incredible program.
A bit of googling shows that WikiPad might be a good (free) Windows/OSX/Linux alternative with similar capabilities, but I haven't used it.
I use WordPad to take the vast majority of my notes. Any text document will do, though. I also keep a physical notebook and pen on me where ever I go in order to jot down on the spot notes or ideas.
I use Ema Personal Wiki to record notes that are currently considered canon within my world-building process. There are quiet a few Wiki options, so pick the one that is most comfortable for you. WikidPad is another wiki program that I recommend.
I generally draw all of my maps and images and scan them over to my computer using my scanner. With that being said, I see Photoshop, GIMP, and paint.net used quite often in this sub-reddit.
Just remember the golden rule when world-building: back-up often.
I prefer DokuWiki to MediaWiki (though MediaWiki is what Wikipedia uses). There are other options too - investigate! If you don't have a web server to set up an instance, you can look into personal wiki software like Wikidpad, or a hosted wiki website (you have to search for this one - I used to recommend PBwiki but it apparently shut down).
I would recommend WikidPad. Open source, allows you to arrange entries in a tree format. Very quick (I have a wiki with over 600 pages that opens almost instantly)
You could create a journal with hierarchy based on year, month and date.