Why create and have a personal wiki

I often recommend to friends and colleagues that they should create and have a personal wiki, and the most common question is, why? Here are some reasons.

• Think of a wiki as your own personal public notepad.
• Start one with linking to all your existing work / sites from your wiki home page as a list-style overview.
• Document short answers to questions you're commonly asked by colleagues and friends, and share URLs to answers instead of having to retype them
• Answer questions on their own pages with key words in the wiki name to make such answers more easily discoverable via web search - hopefully some will answers to their questions from your wiki instead of having to ask you directly via IM or email.
• A wiki is a good place to easily collect random partial incremental thoughts and lists.
• Publicly capture ideas before developing them into blog post.
• Sharing ideas and iterations, works-in-progress that may or may not develop into their own project or blog post.

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