Disclaimer: I work for Capacities but this article and subject content are not part of my work with them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain what I’m trying to achieve with the notes I take as it’s absolutely not a quest to help me be more productive. Note-taking and productivity are two different worlds to me at this point, so I’ve finally realised that essentially I want to create a Wikipedia with a twist.

This is what I do in my free time, and the lessons I learn from it are what I write about here on Medium as part of my work.

I want a system that shows how I have interacted with the topics I learn about across my lifetime, rather than just a list of facts and information about a topic. I want to open up a page in my Wikipedia (should I call it Bethipedia or is that trying too hard?..) and see what I know, what I find interesting about it, and the media representations I’ve seen about it.

I’ll expand on that last point momentarily before moving on. Creating my Wikipedia with reference to media representations of the topics I’m taking notes on is the perfect intersection of my interests:

I watch TV and read books about various topics of history and related subjects because I am interested in them, and the media representations serve as a launch pad for further research (plus who doesn’t like watching TV and reading?). I then take notes on what I’ve watched/read, then subsequently researched about the topics they touched on, or I link mentions of topics I already have notes on that I find in a book/film. I then want to organise those notes in a logical but fun and visually appealing way. All of those activities are really good fun to me!

Let’s break down how I’m doing it.

What inspiration am I taking from Wikipedia?

I like the info boxes on the right hand side of most large pages, the table of contents and the introductory paragraphs with a summary or overview of the topic.

I’m also increasingly using the “what links here” section that’s hidden in the tools. This shows you the backlinks to the page you’re looking at.

What I’d like my Wikipedia to do differently

If you open the Wikipedia page of France you get an unbelievably long overview of key metrics, history, politics, geography, demographics, language, economy, culture and more. It’s an incredible resource but it’s overwhelming.

Similarly if you click on a year, you get a list of historical events from across the world, people who were born on that day, those who died and more.

1968 was a vital year in global politics but there is so much noise on this page that it’s quite overwhelming and because of the formatting, it’s quite hard to pick out what I’d be interested in.

Now of course this isn’t a critique of Wikipedia, it’s an incredible resource that gives the world access to so much knowledge in a perfectly reasonable format and of course it’s not tailored to my interests.

But I want to create my own version of this though, more slowly and carefully curated to best reflect my interests and research so far. I also one day want to be able to ask my Wikipedia page “what films have I watched that feature France in any way?”, “who do I have notes on who was born in 1909?".

Unsurprisingly, I’ve chosen Capacities as the tool for this. I’ve always said it’s for my permanent notes, and realising I want to create my own Wikipedia now just gives a name to this lifelong mission of learning about everything and organising that info in a way that truly engages me.

Why Capacities?

It’s my favourite note-taking app ever, which is well documented, but specifically it lets me emulate a lot of what I like about Wikipedia.

Capacities is based off objects which are like databases for collecting types of content together (so all people belong to the people object, events to the events object and so on). You can customise most objects with properties if you wish, and you can choose how that property section is laid out if you are on the Believer plan. I love the encyclopedia layout, where key properties are in a sidebar on the left, which emulates the info box well enough for me.

Combining Capacities’ object structure with this layout almost serves like a template for info boxes that are specifically tailored for the types of information my page holds.

There are two examples below.

Both have the encyclopedia layout, so both have info boxes on the side of the page like Wikipedia does.

The properties seen in each info box have previously been defined in the object settings so I haven’t had to manually create this info box or choose the layout for each entry. This is because of how Capacities objects work: all content needs to belong to an object. All I had to do was define what object the page needs to belong to (e.g. country or event), and this automatically assigned the properties and page layout I configured in the country and event objects’ settings.

In practice then, I can create a context specific info box with basically no effort from me at all. I set up the object properties and layout once in the object settings, and then just choose where the content I’m working on needs to live.

The text editor is also flexible and easy to use, which allows me to create a body of text that looks good with better spacing and visual options than Wikipedia due to it being made up of blocks with good linking options (see here), and I can add headings that are automatically turned into a table of contents.

I’ve also written before about how I like to add a TL;DR section at the top of really long notes with lots of sections, which I think is like the Wikipedia intro section.

Then, because it’s a networked note-taking app, Capacities has a far better and more intuitive implementation of the Wikipedia backlinks that are hidden in the “what links here” section thanks to its use of backlinks, and particularly the backlink views that you can filter and sort. It’s exquisite.

The only thing that Capacities needs to add is queries. This will let me ask the questions of the type I posed at the beginning of this article. Wikipedia doesn’t have this either though. I shall be patient, this is a lifelong quest!

More of a twist

So the fact that these are my notes tailored to my interests, and are on a more visually appealing and PKM powerhouse app gives two twists away from Wikipedia’s global knowledge offer. But the extra twist is what I referenced in my first PKM in the wild post:

I take notes on history and I want to visit the places I write about. This means my notes intersect with my real life so there’s an element of travel pics, journal entries and notes from museums/memorials/exhibitions too.

Capacities is still the hub for much of this, but it’s enhanced by Hookmark. I will discuss this in the next article I post about my recent early birthday trip to London!

So there we go. My mission. That sounds a lot more serious than it is in practice, but it’s good to check in on occasion to know where you’re going and what you’re trying to do.

I want to read and learn and visit and travel and engage with history, and note it all down in Capacities, and I want to do this for my whole life, creating my own Wikipedia with a twist :)