The WikiWikiWeb is the first

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham to accompany the

Portland Pattern Repository The Portland Pattern Repository (PPR) is a repository for computer programming software design patterns. It was accompanied by a companion website, WikiWikiWeb, which was the world's first wiki. The repository has an emphasis on Extreme Programmin ...

website discussing

software design pattern In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine ...

s. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' originally also applied to the

wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web applicat ...

that operated the website, written in the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

programming language and later renamed to "WikiBase". The site is frequently referred to by its users as simply "Wiki", and a convention established among users of the early network of wiki sites that followed was that using the word with a capitalized ''W'' referred exclusively to the original site.

History

The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. The concept was based on the ideas developed in

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s. On March 25, 1995, he installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website, c2.com. Cunningham came up with the name WikiWikiWeb because he remembered a

Honolulu International Airport Daniel K. Inouye International Airport , also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the main airport of Oahu, Hawaii.Wiki Wiki Shuttle The Wiki Wiki Shuttle () is a free shuttle bus service at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. Shuttles run between 6:00 am and 10:00 pm local time, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals. In the ...

, a

shuttle bus A shuttle bus is a bus that travels a shorter route in comparison to most bus routes. Typically, shuttle buses travel in both directions between two points. Shuttle buses are designed to transport large groups of people who are all travellin ...

line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...

of "wiki", a

Hawaiian language Hawaiian (', ) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language ...

word for "quick". Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb". , the WikiWikiWeb's '' WelcomeVisitors'' page contained the following description in the first two paragraphs:

Hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text w ...

s between pages on WikiWikiWeb are created by joining capitalized words together, a technique referred to as

camel case Camel case (sometimes stylized as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation. The format indicates the separation of words with a single ...

. This convention of

wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

formatting is still followed by some more recent wiki software, whereas others, such as the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for Media ...

software that powers

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

, allow links without camel case. In December 2014, WikiWikiWeb came under the attack of

vandals The Vandals were a Germanic peoples, Germanic people who first inhabited what is now southern Poland. They established Vandal Kingdom, Vandal kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean islands, and North Africa in the fifth century. The ...

, and was put into a read-only state. On February 1, 2015 Cunningham announced that the Wiki had been rewritten as a

single-page application A single-page application (SPA) is a web application or website that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server, instead of the default method of a web browser loading entire new pag ...

and migrated to the new Federated Wiki.

References

External links

WikiWikiWeb The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' ori ...

() * The WikiBase software () * Wiki design principles () * The history of WikiWikiWeb, including comments by Ward Cunningham ()
Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki
() {{Wiki software Wiki communities Perl software Free wiki software Internet properties established in 1995 American websites 1995 in computing

History

See also

References

External links