Building a Personal Wikipedia with Roam Research

Introduction

Ever wished you could capture and organize your notes, insights, and thoughts in a way that makes it easy to link and retrieve them? Basically, building your own personal Wikipedia? Then Roam Research might be just the tool you have been waiting for.

What Roam is and Why it is Pretty Awesome

Roam is a “note-taking tool for networked thought”. Sounds familiar, right? Isn’t this what Evernote, Notion and so many other note-taking apps are also for? No, not really. Yes, these tools are great for taking notes. But they are not so great for building out a network of notes.

The key difference between Roam and other tools is the way information is organized. Other tools typically rely on hierarchical structures to organize information. In Roam information is connected through bidirectional links and does not live in a fixed structure (this is known as a graph data structure).

For example, in Evernote you store your notes in notebooks. You may have a notebook called ‘Investments’ where you jot down your notes on Warren Buffet’s investment strategy. You may have another notebook called ‘Books’ where you keep the highlights from the books you’ve read. Linking an idea from one of your notes in your ‘Books’ folder to a separate note in your ‘Investments’ folder is not trivial. You may have to copy that great insight from your book notes over to that one note in your notebook on investments. So clunky!

In Roam, on the other hand, linking and organizing notes is very intuitive. Roam makes it super easy to connect topics, information, and insights using bidirectional linking. Bidirectional linking in itself is not that special, but the way Roam makes it available to you is extremely powerful.

How I’m Using Roam for Personal Knowledge Management

Journaling

Your ‘landing page’ in Roam is at your daily notes, where I jot down what I am reading or working on, or thinking about that day. It’s funny, I journaled before but this way of journaling makes it so much more effortless and natural. That is probably because I used to journal in a paper notebook at a set time in the day (the morning). But ideas, reflections, and insights float throughout the day. Having my journal in my browser allows me to capture those when they arise.

While writing daily notes, I am referencing existing ‘pages’ by typing [[some topic]] or creating new pages by using the same syntax [[new page]]. It doesn’t matter whether I am going to use that page right now or not.

If I want to go deeper on a topic, I click on the link to bring me to that page and start adding content there.

For example, I read an interesting article in The Economist and captured some notes. Mentioning it in my daily notes like this:

Then, when I go to the article page by clicking [[Free exchange: Losses by central banks are nothing to fear]] you can see at the bottom of the page my daily note of May 16th, 2020 listed as one of two linked references. The other linked reference is this article (Building a Personal Wikipedia with Roam Research, which I am also writing in Roam) since I mentioned the The Economist article in this paragraph.

Note-taking

At its core, Roam is a note-taking tool allowing you to easily connect topics, ideas, and insights. For my notes on the article [[Free exchange: Losses by central banks are nothing to fear]], I start with some metadata, including things like author, source, and I am always including some tags (which are behaving in the same way as pages and differ just in style).

One of Roam’s key features is its sidebar, allowing you to open up pages without losing your main page in view. In the example below I shift+click [[global financial crisis]] to get an overview of other mentions of ‘global financial crisis’ on other pages I have created.

I can shift+click on a link in the sidebar and it will open up there as well allowing me to dive deeper into this topic. For example, I can click on [[Credit-rating agencies: Markers marked]] to open that article.

Writing

I think you may be getting the main idea of Roam and why it so powerful. And not only for note-taking, but also for writing. For example, this article is an adaptation of a blog post on my favorite productivity and knowledge management tools which I’ve published on the internal Tamr blog (Tamr is the company where I work). I want to reuse parts of the text from that blog and Roam makes that extremely easy, again with the help of the sidebar.

I can either copy-paste the text or preserve the link by option+dragging (for mac) the bullet(s) into the article I am writing. The dragged text will become an active link that takes you back to the ‘source’. The linked text gets a subtle underline. To the right of the original text, you now see the number ‘1’ indicating this text has once been referenced elsewhere. Clicking that ‘1’ shows you where the text has been referenced.

When you are writing and using multiple sources, this is a great way to maintain the connections and to help you in creating a list of references.

What I am Paying for Roam and Final Thoughts

Okay, I am going to stop here for now. There are many more cool things you can do with Roam, but I’ll leave it to you to do some exploring yourself.

One great resource that got me started is Nat Eliason’s video What’s So Great About Roam Research? He also has a great course on using Roam in case you really want to go all the way and join the Roam Cult.

Roam is currently live in beta (there may be a waiting list), but they will soon start billing. The founder indicated pricing at $15/month, with lower pricing points for students and several other user categories.

Roam is not cheap and more expensive than other tools like Evernote and Notion. But for me, it is totally worth it, as it allows me to capture ideas, insights, and thoughts in a networked and intuitive way and enables me to write more effectively.

Disclosure: After first becoming a Believer and signing up for the 5-year plan in 2020, I also became an investor in Roam Research by participating in their 2021 funding round.

You can find this and other stories on my website www.thalein.com.