WikiWikiWeb

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Revision as of 18:14, 8 February 2015 by 79.64.38.36 (talk) (Why is this still being reverted? It's based entirely on factual information that is trivially observable on Ward's Wiki, and expands on existing content.)
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<ul><li>"GoalReached" is not in the list (Vibrant, Active, New, In preparation, Dormant, Spammed, Private, Cannot connect, Dead, Locked, ...) of allowed values for the "Wiki status" property.</li> <!--br--><li>"ReadOnly" is not in the list (OpenEdit, SaveAfterPreview, LoginToEdit, ConfirmEmail, ByInvitation, Unknown edit mode, Pay to edit, Login via forum, Read-only) of allowed values for the "Wiki edit mode" property.</li></ul>

http://c2.com/sig/wiki.gif WikiWikiWeb
Recent changes
WikiNode
About
[No Mobile URL]
Founded by: WardCunningham
Status: GoalReached"GoalReached" is not in the list (Vibrant, Active, New, In preparation, Dormant, Spammed, Private, Cannot connect, Dead, Locked, ...) of allowed values for the "Wiki status" property.
Language: English
Edit mode: ReadOnly"ReadOnly" is not in the list (OpenEdit, SaveAfterPreview, LoginToEdit, ConfirmEmail, ByInvitation, Unknown edit mode, Pay to edit, Login via forum, Read-only) of allowed values for the "Wiki edit mode" property.
Wiki engine: WikiWikiWeb
Wiki license: [[:Category:Wiki {{{license}}}|{{{license}}}]]
Main topic: Software development
Backups: 2011-06-04
WikiTourBus

visit stop 
1, 12, 42, 66
Wiki size: 36,857 article pages [No see stats]
as of 26.12.2014


WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki engine and wiki forum ever! The wiki engine has been developed in the Perl programming language since 1994 by WardCunningham, and is based on a HyperCard stack that Cunningham designed for collaboration with his former colleagues at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon.

WikiWikiWeb was FoundedIn1995, and is part of the RealNamesNetwork and WikiWikiWebAndItsSisterSites. It has also been informally called Wards Wiki, as a homage to its creator.

Creation of the WikiWikiWeb

The wiki forum was inaugurated in the Internet domain of Cunningham's software consultancy Cunningham & Cunningham, Incorporated, also in Portland, on March 25, 1995, as an automated add-on to its Portland Pattern Repository, a directory for publication of programming patterns which programmers sent by E-mail.

Both the wiki engine and the wiki forum are called WikiWikiWeb. Abbreviated variants of the name WikiWikiWeb are WikiWiki and Wiki. Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb after 'Wiki Wiki', a line of Chance RT-52 shuttle buses running between terminals at Honolulu International Airport. The name of the shuttle line is derived from the Hawaiian-language expression "wiki wiki", which is a word reduplication of "wiki", a word that means "fast". The reduplication wiki wiki is used to emphasize wiki, so wiki wiki could be translated as "faster than fast".

Because the simple Wiki software is rarely altered, new facilities are typically implemented by de-facto policy and manual effort, or via external Web sites. This has the benefit of allowing facilities to be flexibly added without programming. However, it requires manual effort to maintain. For example, ChangesInMonth were always generated manually and maintained by a succession of individuals, most recently John Fletcher.

The tag line of WikiWikiWeb is "People, Programming and Patterns". The original purpose of WikiWikiWeb was to document programming patterns, especially for members of Ralph Johnson's patterns mailing list, and for people who attended the Patterns Languages of Programs Conference (PLoP) and the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA).

Subsequent Events

From 1996 to 1998, discussion of extreme programming (XP) became more popular, and the first members of WikiWikiWeb, who preferred to discuss patterns, started emigrating. Some of them later complained about missing Wiki before XP.

Many former regular users of WikiWikiWeb have complained that the discussion on WikiWikiWeb has deteriorated since about 1999 or 2000, and some of them have described that deterioration as the heat death of Wiki.

In early December 2014, WikiIndex user user:manorainjan -- who was banned from WikiWikiWeb in late November 2014 for demonstrating anti-community activity and failing to engage in dialogue with the Wiki community over his apparent attempts to add a "category none" to every uncategorised page -- began frequently and continuously (over 12 hours per day) spamming the WikiWikiWeb with attempts to preserve approximately 15 pages he created shortly before and after the ban. On the WikiWikiWeb, bans were externally enforced via the use of a 'bot that automatically reverted edits made by banned users. The result was that the WikiWikiWeb "new recent changes" page at [http://c2.com/cgi/RecentChanges] frequently looked like the following:

http://shark.armchair.mb.ca/~dave/WardsWikiDecember2014.png

By late December 2014, user:manorainjan was apparently using an automated script to attempt to not only preserve the aforementioned 15 pages, but also to apparently keep them at the top of RecentChanges. On December 25th, he began creating hundreds of content-free pages with names consisting of strings of repeated characters or words, as shown below:

http://shark.armchair.mb.ca/~dave/WardsWikiBadPagenames.png

The above shows a portion of the WikiWikiWeb "Recent changes" after the 'bot (with the domain name x21.armchair.mb.ca, in this case) has reverted nonsense pages created by user:Manorainjan. Hundreds of similar nonsense-page creations and deletions are not shown.

On December 26th, 2014, as of 23:46, the wiki was effectively made read-only. Attempts to save page changes consistently resulted in the error message "Suspicious source (tor.ahbl.org)". This was instated minutes after WikiWikiWeb user Dave Voorhis sent the following message to WardCunningham expressing concern about the disruptive editing by user:Manorainjan:

http://shark.armchair.mb.ca/~dave/MessageToWard.png

On February 1st, 2015, the WikiWikiSystemNotice page introduced a complete re-write of the WikiWikiWeb software platform which had been in development since 2011. Notably, deployment of the new software platform was apparently accelerated by the abuse described above. According to the WikiWikiSystemNotice:

After twenty years of service I'm pleased to announce a complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application with a distributed database which will last us for at least 20 years, maybe 200.

see [http://c2.fed.wiki.org]

We've recently endured abuse that has moved our conversion date forward before we were fully prepared. I apologize for this. Expect the new to be well aligned with the capabilities of the modern internet with plenty of opportunity for participation that was not possible before. Thank you all.

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