WikiWikiWeb

first-ever user-editable website

The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website, like Wikipedia. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by its inventor, programmer Ward Cunningham, to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name WikiWikiWeb originally also applied to the wiki software that operated the website, written in the Perl 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.

WikiWikiWeb
Type of site
Wiki with focus on software design patterns
Available inEnglish
HeadquartersPortland, Oregon
OwnerCunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
Created byWard Cunningham
URLwiki.c2.com
RegistrationNot implemented; users can edit using any name and optionally create a page about themselves under that name
LaunchedMarch 25, 1995; 29 years ago (1995-03-25)
Current statusActive (Read-only indefinitely since February 1, 2015)
WikiWikiWeb
LicenseGNU GPL[1]
Ward Cunningham in 2011

History

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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 stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s.[2][3][4] 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 counter employee who told him to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian language word for "quick".[5] 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".

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References

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  1. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWebFaq
  2. WikiHistory on c2.com
  3. Interview: Wikinewsie Kim Bruning discusses Wikimania on WikiNews
  4. Interview with Ward Cunningham Archived 2007-05-07 at the Wayback Machine on Google Video
  5. Andrews, Lorrin (1865), A dictionary of the Hawaiian language to which is appended an English-Hawaiian vocabulary and a chronological table of remarkable events, Henry M. Whitney, p. 514