Well, for starters you could just install XAMPP and then install the MediaWiki software and you would have a local, personal Wikipedia.

But if you want something a little more geared towards documents and notes specifically, Evernote and Springboard are both pretty handy for notetaking and organization.

And if you didn't mind paying for it, I would always suggest Microsoft's One Note for organizing data. Easily the best thing Microsoft's ever done.

TiddlyWiki, which is basically a browser-based wiki that stores the info in one HTML file. It's also free and open source under the BSD licence.
www.tiddlywiki.com/
www.tiddlywiki.org

http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ works wonderfully. I've used it for organizing research for papers and projects, and haven't had any problems. It works in a standalone application that can export pages to individual html files or a single html file, list style.

:> Thaaaaanks

Experimented. Haven't tried MediaWiki yet.

Tried TiddlyWiki. It's cute! But feels.. lacking something. Needs more play.

Wikidpad *does* look like it's wonderful. But I'ma need to study this for awhile. It's both unfamiliar and a little.. complicated. Urrrgh. But thank you, kind anonymous folk and Chev.

Resophnotes is pretty good, has search and wiki-style links, and doesn't take up 50 megabytes sitting idle like Wikidpad does.
Quicknote is what I use on my shit-tier computer, it uses like 50K, pops up on a hotkey, and hides when you click away.
Neither is FOSS or creative commons though.
It doesn't matter that much what you choose, every program in this thread is better than plain text files.

>>2876
Yeaaaah. In all honesty, I'm just using this as a place to store my ar pee gee game shit for quick, private reference. Mechanics, lore, that sort of stuff. Can only go so far with plain txt files before things look awful.

..Well. Learning how to wikidpad from a position of 'no fucking experience' is proving to be weird and unfamiliar.

>>2890
It's not the most intuitive experience, but it's manageable when you get used to it.

Basically, you create pages by defining their title, either by bracketing words or by putting a capital letter at the front of a word and at least one more in the middle/end.

If you're creating a new page, it always appears treed off the page in which you original referenced its title.

For the CamelCaps:
ExamPle
ExamplE
EXample
EXAmple

all should create new pages. Also, they all create unique pages.

eXample
examplE
eXamplE

all should not create pages.

>>2891
Are all pages and page assignments pretty much equal, or is there some function that will designate a parent page with children subjects, or.. something?

For instance, say I wanted a page for each individual spell, and I wanted another page that linked to the list of these spells. Would all these different pages, functionally, just be the same -kind- of page with different purposes, or is there some sort of function that automatically makes new pages into a parent page's "child"?

>>2892
The way that I think it works is that pages in and of themselves aren't special. They're all just pages. The tree view is created by how you link pages. For instance, take a look at this picture. You'll see how there's multiple entries for [hel] and [Spells] in the tree. That's because I put a link to each in each other. That tree will open indefinitely.

There's really only one [Spells] page. If you make a change on one and go to another one, you'll see that the change is there as well. Linking a page puts it in the tree, along with any children defined off it.

So, what I'd do is create a page called [List of Spells] or something. That will create that page. Then, you can just start naming spells:
[Spell A]
[Spell B]
and so on.
Those pages will be the children of the first [List of Spells] page, and you can link to the list page by linking [List of Spells], or an individual Spell page.

Then, any time you link to [List of Spells], not only do you have a link to the full list in your body text, you also place the full list in expandable form on the tree view.

>>2894
Thank you, Chev. Bonus points for the visual aid, too.
Alrighty. Lets see what I can pump out with this.