Personal Wikis, second brains, I have no use for none of that. I keep most what I read in my brain, I just let it be absorbed and be integrated in my "world model", even if that means losing sight of many details. I also usually remember roughly from which book I got a certain idea, and can refer to it at any point. I do keep a structure of sorts, it is simply the filesystem hierarchy of directories where the books are stored. The books themselves serve as a kind of reference. It doesn't matter that I haven't read all of them, for a great many of them, I've read just a few chapters, or even just the preface. Enough to have an idea of the contents and the style of each of them, and where I can reach for more elaboration, specific information, whatever.
In this sense, it _is_ like a second brain which I can consult at any time but which I haven't yet absorbed into the first one, the first one is a view of the forest, the second one holds the trees, it can also be thought of as a map of the forest.
No notes of my own, I don't need that. But sometimes I do wish I had a more or less convenient way to keep some notes from books I read. The reading app I use lets me highlight text, and keep bookmarks, but that metadata resides in the app and not in the ebook files themselves, not every book is properly OCR'd and I can't highlight shit, and the app is just the front, which I use in the reading device, which is not the same as the storage device, the reading device may stop working at any time and I would just get another one.
I do keep notebooks at home, those I use heavily. I use them for language learning, which involves: vocabulary lists, paradigms, structural analysis of difficult sentences, copying texts, and plenty of exercise drills. Of this, the paradigms and vocabulary lists are the only bits that I refer to, and they occupy relatively small part of the notebook's contents and I usually stop needing most of that material at some point. I gotta say, I really enjoy having my notebooks scribbled with text written in strange scripts from all over the world. Sometimes I say, regarding my lack of creative skills: my notebooks are my craft :-)
I have been interested in the topic of structured notes, personal wikis, all that stuff, but I don't really know what I would put in such files. I also don't want to spend a lot of time learning the ropes of some system like org-mode or whatever, when all I want is to keep notes. Then again, if I think abo
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