Wikis

Where Wikis Come from

Ward Cunningham is usually credited with the substantive invention and development of the idea of a wiki. Cunningham described a wiki as “a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and cross links between internal pages on the fly.” While similar ideas for simple computer-networked, collaborative text publishing have been proposed (perhaps as far back as the early 1970s), Cunningham brought to life the first usable public wiki, using his WikiWikiWeb software in 1995 for the Portland Pattern Repository (which collected public information about computer programming with an emphasis on pattern languages). Like many innovative Web developments, the first use was for computer science, but the idea rapidly spread and became a much more general feature of the Internet.

The essential element of a wiki is captured in its name, a shortened form of the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki,[Page 949]which means “quick.” Wikis are a quick form of Web publishing and for that reason have become very popular with those less interested in designing sophisticated, top-down Websites but wish instead to rapidly create and publish information online. Wikis use a modified form of hypertext markup language (HTML) to control the basic display of plain text on a Web page. Simple formatting commands are easily included along with the text to be displayed. The complex page-control elements used within HTML are largely ignored or, at least, rendered automatically by the wiki software. Much more importantly, however, wikis in theory treat the Web page that is displayed on a computer screen as a read/write space—not a page to be authored by one person and read by many but one that can be easily and quickly edited by anyone reading that page.

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