WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki.
Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the
Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a
Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "
Wiki Wiki Shuttle"
bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham,
"I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and
thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's
HyperCard.
Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card
stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed
Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text."
In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as
collaborative software. Common uses included project communication,
intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Today some
companies use wikis
as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static
intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance
group learning. There may be greater use of wikis behind
firewalls than on the public Internet.
Ward Cunningham and co-author
Bo Leuf, in their book
The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the Wiki concept as follows:
- 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.
A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a
simple markup language and a web browser. A single page in a wiki
website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of
pages, which are usually well interconnected by
hyperlinks,
is "the wiki". A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing,
and searching through information. A wiki allows fornon-linear,
evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.
A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which
pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before
modifications are accepted. Many wikis are open to alteration by the
general public without requiring them to register
user
accounts. Many edits can be made in real-time and appear almost
instantly online. This can facilitate abuse of the system. Private wiki
servers require
user authentication to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them.
Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Cito Maramba and
Steve Wheeler
write that it is the "openness of wikis that gives rise to the concept
of 'Darwikinism', which is a concept that describes the '
socially Darwinian
process' that wiki pages are subject to. Basically, because of the
openness of wikis and the rapidity with which wiki pages can be edited,
the pages undergo a
natural selection
process like that which nature subjects to living organisms. 'Unfit'
sentences and sections are ruthlessly culled, edited and replaced if
they are not considered 'fit', which hopefully results in the evolution
of a higher quality and more relevant page. Whilst such openness may
invite 'vandalism' and the posting of untrue information, this same
openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a
'quality' wiki page."
for more detail click here
