This question comes from a reader of the Notion course. It has been organized and shared here. If you encounter similar issues while using Notion, feel free to leave a comment.
The Purpose of Notion Wiki
The core use of Notion Wiki is to build a collaborative knowledge base for storing and querying authoritative information. From this statement, we can extract 4 keywords. We need to analyze the needs or context behind each keyword to better determine whether you actually need the Wiki feature.
- Storage: There are digital documents that need to be properly saved and managed
- Querying: These documents need to be searched relatively frequently to provide the latest or most authoritative definitions or explanations
- Authority: The authority or validity of these documents is closely tied to the editor or the last edit time
- Collaboration: This knowledge base is primarily used in collaborative settings, serving teams, groups, or organizational members
However, even without Wiki, you can use basic Pages or databases to fulfill these four needs to some extent. This is precisely why we question whether Wiki is really necessary.
We can use databases to help understand this issue. A database has 6 types of views, each emphasizing different dimensions of information:
- Table view: The richest in information, but each field has equal display weight
- Board view: Emphasizes grouping
- Gallery view: Emphasizes images
- Calendar view: Emphasizes dates
- Timeline view: Emphasizes workflows
- List view: Emphasizes titles
There is no inherently better or worse view — choose the one that highlights the information dimension you want to see first.
The same logic applies to Wiki. If you value the timeliness or authority of documents, then Wiki is a good choice for building your knowledge base, because only Wiki has the Owner and Verification fields.
Why is Wiki better suited for collaborative scenarios? Because if you are the only user, the Owner is always yourself, and you do not need the Verification field to determine the authority or validity period of a document.
FAQ
Should I switch from a database to Wiki?
Based on your daily needs and usage, I would say no. Wiki is not more powerful than a database — it simply has two additional fields. In the foreseeable future, Wiki will not surpass databases either, because it is essentially a subset of databases.
Will a large number of synced blocks cause lag?
From my personal experience, no. Although an original block may be referenced by hundreds of other pages, when loading a single page, the synced block is only loaded a few times (if you have multiple headings). It does not traverse all pages and load everything at once.
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