EMZETT.Wiki (Concept)
In short: A collection of interlinked pages, typically edited and maintained collaboratively.
In more detail: The name comes from the Hawaiian word for “fast” — the basic idea is that every page is easy to create, link, and edit. Used for documentation, knowledge bases, or personal note collections; this wiki itself is an example of that, built with the static-site generator Quartz.
In Depth
The defining feature of a wiki is the dense mutual linking between pages (often called “wikilinks”, e.g. [[other-term]] in Quartz) — instead of filing content in rigid folder hierarchies, a network of terms emerges that explain and complement each other. Anyone who comes across an unfamiliar term while reading an article can click straight through to the corresponding explanation, instead of having to leave the page. A graph view (like the right sidebar in this wiki) even makes this network of relationships visually visible.
The world’s probably best-known wiki is Wikipedia, whose name combines “wiki” and “encyclopedia”. Originally (Ward Cunningham, 1995), wikis were mainly intended for collaborative, often anonymous editing by many contributors — today the same principles (fast, linked notes) are also used for personal knowledge bases, often with tools like Obsidian or indeed Quartz, which generates static HTML pages from Markdown files, entirely without a database or server backend at runtime.
Technically, wiki engines mainly differ in HOW content is stored and delivered: classic wikis like MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) store content in a database and dynamically render pages on a server on every request. Quartz, by contrast, is a static-site generator — the entire content is generated once at build time as finished HTML files and then simply delivered as static files, with no server-side logic per page view. This makes it faster and easier to host, but less suited for wikis with very many simultaneous editors.
The “Zettelkasten” idea
Many modern personal wikis (like this one) draw on the “Zettelkasten” (slip-box) principle of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who for decades maintained thousands of handwritten index cards with unambiguous cross-references between them, to capture complex chains of thought. The digital implementation (small, atomic notes, densely linked to each other, instead of a few large, unstructured documents) has proven especially effective for knowledge work: individual terms can be maintained independently of each other and still be placed, via links, into any number of larger contexts, without content having to be duplicated redundantly in several places.
Graph view and emergent structure
A feature many modern wiki tools (like Quartz or Obsidian) share is an automatically generated graph view — every article is shown as a node, every wikilink as an edge between two nodes. Unlike a manually maintained content structure (chapters, subchapters), this structure emerges “organically” from the actual content connections between articles — clusters of closely related topics become visually visible in the graph, without anyone having explicitly defined that grouping.
Wikis for learning purposes
Beyond the classic reference-work function, densely linked wikis are especially well suited for exam preparation: instead of memorising terms in isolation, the linking fosters a networked understanding of how individual technical terms relate to each other — exactly the use case this wiki, with its hundreds of linked IT fundamentals terms, was originally created for.
See also: HTML