WikiWikiWeb

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wiki.gif WikiWikiWeb
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Founded by: Ward Cunningham
Status: Locked
Language: English
Edit mode: Read-only
Wiki engine: Federated wiki
Wiki license: [[:Category:Wiki {{{license}}}|{{{license}}}]]
Main topic: Software development
Backups: 2011-06-04
WikiTourBus

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A beaming Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, circa 2006
Wiki size: 36,854 article pages see stats

(As of: 2014-12-26)


The WikiWikiWeb wiki site is the world's first, oldest, and longest-running wiki site. It primarily focussed on people, projects, and patterns in software development. WikiWikiWeb was originally powered by software known as Wiki Base[1] and located at http://C2.com/cgi/wiki – a location that is still available (though now redirects to https://Wiki.C2.com), but locked to read-only due to persistent vandalism in December 2014 and January 2015. In February 2015, WikiWikiWeb was migrated to a Federated wiki (originally at http://C2.Fed.Wiki.org/).

The first wiki engine software was compiled in the Perl programming language in 1994 by Ward Cunningham (now known as the 'father of wiki'), and was based on a HyperCard stack that Cunningham designed for collaboration with his former colleagues at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon. WikiWikiWeb was founded in 1995 under 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.

Confusingly, the original Perl-based software and the actual content it maintained were frequently both described as the WikiWikiWeb, especially prior to the existence of other wikis. This article page here on WikiIndex refers to the wiki site and its textual content, rather than the WikiWikiWeb software itself.

Abbreviated variants of the name WikiWikiWeb are WikiWiki and Wiki. It has also been informally called Ward's Wiki, as an homage to its creator. Ward 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 wiki, which means 'fast' or 'quick'.[2] The repetition wiki wiki is used to emphasize wiki, so wiki wiki could be interpreted as 'faster than fast'.

The original wiki software, Wiki Base,[1] was rarely altered, so new facilities were typically implemented by de-facto policy and manual effort, or via external websites. 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 new Federated wiki software permits extensions via plugins, which may facilitate automating processes that were formerly manual.

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). 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.

Some former regular users of WikiWikiWeb complained that the discussion on WikiWikiWeb deteriorated since about 1999 or 2000, describing that deterioration as the heat death of Wiki. Later activity focused more on 'thread mode' debates and social banter around programming topics, plus curation of the early content, than the 'document mode' creation of summary pages that characterised its early Patterns and XP years.

References
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Wiki Base (Q21562045) – wiki software that runs WikiWikiWeb; Reasonator.Toolforge.org; Reasonator, at Wikimedia Toolforge; accessed 22 December 2022.
  2. ↑ Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki; C2.com; Ward Cunningham; November 2003; accessed 22 December 2022.
External links
Retrieved from "https://wikiindex.org/index.php?title=WikiWikiWeb&oldid=273178"