WikiWikiWeb
"Federated wiki" 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.
http://c2.com/sig/wiki.gif | WikiWikiWeb Recent changes WikiNode About [No Mobile URL] |
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Founded by: | WardCunningham |
Status: | Active |
Language: | English |
Edit mode: | Federated wiki"Federated wiki" 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: | Federated wiki |
Wiki license: | [[:Category:Wiki {{{license}}}|{{{license}}}]] |
Main topic: | Software development |
Backups: | 2011-06-04 |
Wiki size: | 36,857 article pages [No see stats] |
as of 26.12.2014
The WikiWikiWeb is the world's first and longest-running wiki. Its original wiki engine was developed in the Perl programming language in 1994 by WardCunningham, and was based on a HyperCard stack that Cunningham designed for collaboration with his former colleagues at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon. It is now part of Ward Cunningham's Federated wiki system.
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.
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".
The original Perl-based Wiki software was rarely altered, so new facilities were typically implemented by de-facto policy and manual effort, or via external Web sites. This had the benefit of allowing facilities to be flexibly added without programming. However, it required 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 complained that the discussion on WikiWikiWeb deteriorated since about 1999 or 2000, and some of them 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.
- External links
- Ward's Personal Pages (these pages are not inside the wiki)
- Additional tags
- All
- Wikis with a WikiNode
- Active
- Wiki English
- Federated wiki
- Software development
- Wiki database backup
- Wikis reachable by WikiTourBus 1
- Wikis reachable by WikiTourBus 12
- Wikis reachable by WikiTourBus 42
- Wikis reachable by WikiTourBus 66
- Wiki with 20,001 to 50,000 pages
- Perl
- Collaboration
- FoundedIn1995
- RealNamesNetwork
- WikiWikiWebAndItsSisterSites
- Software
- Programming
- People
- Projects
- Patterns
- WikiWikiWeb