all the wikis

The first wiki, the wiki wiki web, is the brainchild of Ward Cunningham. Conceived in 1994 and born in 1995, this first wiki website, http://c2.com can still be visited.

Ward was looking for a quick way to work with other programmers to collaboratively publish software patterns on the web. He drew on his work with HyperCard Stacks.

Ward Cunningham’s stroke of genius

Combining collaborative editing of individual web pages with the hyperlink functionality of HyperCard was a stroke of genius. Not only can authors easily edit existing pages but they can also, just as easily, add new pages. A wiki website can grow without the constraints of a strict hierarchical structure.

On a wiki website, authors can create and link to a new page from anywhere. They can even link to a page that does not yet exist and the link signals that the new page needs developing. These capabilities remain central to modern wikis.

The essence of the Wiki concept

Bo Leuf was one of Ward’s early collaborators on the wiki wiki web. Bo and Ward published the book The Wiki Way, quick collaboration on the web. In it, they describe the essence of the Wiki concept by these statements:

• ‘A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.’

Although, the capability to easily edit pages, create new ones and make links between them remains central to wikis today, wiki development, pretty much like wiki websites themselves, has not been constrained by this early description. Modern wikis are not only used for collaborative web publishing but also knowledge repositories, Content Management Systems, project management, discussion forums and plain old web site maintenance. They are popular tools for business, education or social applications.

Wiki words, WikiWords

The word wiki came from Ward Cunningham. The word wiki wiki is Hawaiian and means: fast, quick, to hurry, hasten, swift. The story goes that Ward saw the word wikiwiki on the airport express bus at the airport in Hawaii. WikiWikiWeb, means ‘quick web’.

Early descriptions of wikis are full of WikiWords. A WikiWord is a composite word of two or more words capitalised and joined together without the space in between. This is termed CamelCase.

WikiWords were initially used to signal hyperlinks in wikis. A WikiWord signalled a link to another page, even if that page had yet to be created. This created problems. NewPage, for example was fine but what about McIntosh. Every time this name, or one similar, was used, the wiki interpreted it as a hyperlink. Similarly, problems occurred when a one word title was chosen for a new page. For example, you could not have a page called Contents, it would have to be called ContentsPage.

Other geeky language, which, to the rest of us seems more nerdish than geeky, accompanied the development of wikis. Wiki farm, wiki text, wiki engine, sees my wiki glossary for explanations.

Wikis break out of geeksville

You no longer need to understand geek-speak to work on a wiki. Non-geeks find them as easy to work on modern wikis, as it is to work on their favorite word processor. You can use or even administer a modern wiki without seeing wiki text, or CamelCase, hacking a source or debugging PERL.

Ward Cunningham deserves the credit he gets for creating the first wiki. However, the developers, users and providers who followed deserve a great deal of credit for extending wikis far beyond its envisioned use.

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