Usage question -- all opinion!
Virtual Research Environment / On-line Bibliography Manager
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OK, here's a question that is strictly opinion...I'm trying to figure out how, exactly, I want to use wikindx. Currently, I use a vim outline plugin to keep track of my notes, etc. It's fast, quick, and I can just keep a running tally of my resources and mark them with bookmarks for quick access. No mousework necessary: I can just read and type. The interrupt time between research and data entry is minimal.
Obviously, wikindx provides some rich tools that aren't available with the vim plugin. I'm trying to determine whether it would be worth my time to continue using the vim plugin, and write a script which would parse the text into quotes, paraphrases, etc. and populate the wikindx DB. Or should I just bite the bullet and resign myself to the fact that if I plan on getting my dissertation done within this lifetime, I should just get used to being able to pause long enough to click open a new quote or paraphrase screen when I need one?
Does this make any sense? Am I the only one who's ever wrestled with this?
Of course I'm going to say use wikindx. However, in support, I do use it myself for my own thesis and, now, couldn't imagine using anything else. Mainly the search functions in addition to the bibliographic formatting.
Hopefully the next full release will have the killer app which will be a simple word processor/wiki that will output to RTF/PDF/TeX and that will deal with in-text/footnote citations, append bibliographies, allow some text formatting and allow for quick insertion of resource meta data such as quotes, paraphrases. etc. I plan to do my whole thesis in wikindx (which is part of my thesis anyway -- a sort of hyperthesis ;)) using OpenOffice solely for the final formatting polish.
Mark.
A year ago, I made a primitive system that used BASH for populating a MySQL database and PHP for presentation. I abandoned work on this and reverted to my old setup after finding Wikindx, which was much further along than my system. I figured Wikindx would be perfected in time (it was at version 1.x then) and fortunately it was. I just recently started with version 3.0, and though I'm very happy with its features, I'm not used to clicking my way through resource entry (I also prefer vim).
I currently use Wikindx for building custom bibliographies (the search is a great help), which I dump to BibTeX and use along with the IEEE BibTeX style file. My solution for speeding up entry has been Firefox's "find as you type" :p, though it hasn't helped as much as I'd like. Despite the extra time for entry, Wikindx is a great research aide. Particularly, I value its category/keyword organization, search features, file attachments, and imports/exports (plus it's a wiki!).
-Frank