30th WikiBirthday

30 years of the Wonderful Wiki Web

March 25, 2025 is the 30th birthday of the WikiWikiWeb.

30th WikiBirthday — March 25, 2025

Below is just a start, feel free to add more ideas. We just had a first organizing meeting, and there will be another next week! (Tuesday, Feb 11) Reach out if you would like to get involved, you can reach me at wiki30 (at) ourpla.net --John Abbe (talk) 03:22, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

What is already in the works?

• An open video call - featuring one or more names wiki folk will recognize and want to hear from, *and* with plenty of time (probably in breakout groups if it's a lot of people?) for people to catch up or get to know each other, share some wiki stories, etc. Learn something, connect with someone, and celebrate! (Details to be clarified on Feb 25 planning call)

• A WikiBirthday card that everyone is invited to contribute to.

• Add other things people are organizing here

• ??

Other possibilities

What else would you like to see?

That is a Tuesday. So, we could lean into the Tech Tuesdays thing. And/or, March 26 could be a global retro/reunion for WikiWednesdays, everyone organize whatever they want locally. Suggest we pick one of these early on and go for it.

Who's organizing WikiBirthday this year?

So far: John Abbe, Mark Dilley, Cary, Phoebe, Pete, You

Next steps include networking and generally getting the word out: Contact wikizens, wiki developers, maker spaces, free/open projects (OSU still host a bunch?), other coder commons, Wikia refugees, etc.

Themes / Names Explorations

WonderfulWikiWeb

Many people are understandably pretty down on the Internet and web these days, as for-profit companies exploit their attention (and pocketbooks!) with dark patterns. But these tools have also given us so much, and continue to! We want people to notice and love and defend the wonderful things about the Internet, and we're inspired by how the IETF organizes itself, and some of the things they say. We want people to notice and love and defend the wonderful things about the web, and wiki has brought so much wonder to so many, we see this 30th WikiBirthday as an opportunity to celebrate and share that wonder with each other, and as much as we can with the rest of the world as well.

Wiki: A way of thinking about and practicing collaborative in an increasingly factious world

Wiki: A sometimes shining example of collaboration and intertwingliness

Wikipedia: A tool for managing mis- and dis-information in a world where the quality and source of information is increasingly difficult to perceive++

History of wikis

• Wiki engine evolution tree - a history of wiki engines and software
• WikiHistory from C2
• History of wikis, from Wikipedia

WikiBirthdayCard

Would you like to wish wiki a happy birthday? Leave your message below.

• How have wikis changed you? What has wiki meant to you? What wikis have you edited, and why?
• How are wikis important for the world?
• What do you want to see for the next 30 years?

Leave your notes, thoughts, photos and well wishes below.

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• Thank you Ward for starting a platform that changed my life. Wikis promise that together, we can make it better -- and together, we have. My participation with wikis has been as an editor of Wikimedia projects, local wikis, and internal wikis; an educator/author; and a conference organizer for Recent Changes Camp, WikiSym, Wikimania, and many other Wikimedia events. I've put my energy into organizing events over the years because it's the in-person manifestation of what makes wikis so interesting to me - people coming together to create something wonderful in the same space. -- Phoebe (talk) 15:35, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

ideas from Recent Changes Camp 2008, photo by Jay Walsh [1]

• After a few days intensively focused on reading & writing in the new-to-me WikiWikiWebs in 1998(?), I knew my experience of the web had changed forever when I saw an error on some other website and was confused when I couldn't find the edit button. I had internalized that the web is editable! Wiki became part of my ongoing life, as with Open Space. What makes a wiki a wiki is an amazing conversation to get to be a part of, especially as it becomes clear that there is almost no agreed-upon list of core features. For some, collaboration among people is central, while for others a personal wiki is still a wiki, for some the naming dimension is immense, for others, it's a sideline. Are structured wikis still wikis? It depends? "What is a wiki?" quickly (over a period of years) became one of those questions that will never have a definitive answer. I believe that the web, and the world, will be endlessly grateful it was Ward and other early wiki folks who put hypertext on the map of the early web, a space of many ecosystems that wiki continues to inhabit and grow into. In any case, HippoBirdieToYou on your 30th birthday, wiki. --John Abbe (talk) 19:02, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you, Ward, for so many life changing innovations! Keep on hacking, Dirk Riehle (talk) 20:02, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

• I had been a happy user of HyperCard around 1995. And first encountered wikis in October 2001 with excitement. I still remember very vividly my first edit on wikipedia, end of 2001. I had started a line of text with a « space » without noticing and spend 30 unsuccessful minutes trying to figure out why the font looked different and all weird. It freaked me out so bad that I could not fix it (and it stayed unfixed for a long time...), that it took me a full month to dare editing a Wikipedia article again (being given freedom to act, and thus to make mistakes, can be paralyzing...). And then I jumped in the bath, and rapidly became addicted. And soon I felt the pain of not being able to fix « things » on the other websites. The presence of that Edit Button changed everything, giving unprecedented power to every single person. « It's not a bug, it’s a feature » became my mantra. 22 years down the line, it is safe to say that wikis entirely changed my life... I also was a heavy reader for some years of the inspiring meatballwiki and still laugh at the CamelCase system of linking :) I first met Ward in 2005 in Frankfurt, where he gave a presentation [2], attended a private dinner [3], and offered a tangible memory of him, a teddy bear won in a typical German fair next to the venue [4]. Thank you Ward for inventing wikis ! You made the world a better place. The last element I would share when it comes to my personal relationship with wikis is that I became the co-author of the original and long-lasting Mediawiki logo with Erik Moeller [5]. Wikis changed the world and changed the way people collaborate. Happy birthday wikis. Anthere (talk) 11:02, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you, Ward, for all the goodness you brought to our lives. Happy 30th, and for many mote to come! Shani (talk) 14:27, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you Ward for bringing this amazing gift to the world! -- JackHerrick (talk) 21:55, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

• My life would have been completely different, if not for wikis. I met my wife at Wikimania, I wrote in my dissertation about semantic wikis, most of my work has been wiki-related. It is impossible to overstate what role wikis played in my life. Thank you, Ward! --Denny (talk) 12:02, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Happy wikibirthday! I learnt lots from the WikiWikiWeb c.2001, mainly spelunking through all the different WikiEngines. Thanks for everything! Samwilson (talk) 13:04, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Happy 30th wikibirthday! I, too, owe so much to wikis, including marital bliss. I remember exploring design patterns on the original wikiwiki, and also remember hearing about Wikipedia in 2001 ("building an encyclopedia on a wiki!") and immediately thinking "that could never work!". I am delighted to have been very wrong. Here's to the next 30 years! :) Asaf Bartov (talk) 13:09, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Ward, my life path would have been very different, surely far less interesting, and I think far less productive, if not for wiki software and the various communities that have emerged around it. Above all it has helped me develop an understanding (or at least a theory) of the conditions that best support collaboration, which serves me well in every relationship. Hopefully, I've been able to put that to use for others as well. I deeply appreciate your work over the years, which seems consistently driven by care, kindness, and a desire to support people in doing their best work together. Happy wiki birthday! -Pete Forsyth (talk) 16:38, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Discovering Wikipedia, MeatBall, and the original Portland Pattern Repository WikiWikiWeb in 2001 definitely was a turning point in my life. :) I spent many many hours poring over the collected wisdom of other programmers about how we program, and tried to realize those insights in the tools I created for Wikipedia editors to use. I'm astounded and immensely pleased *and* proud that wikis are still around years later and running strong in a lot of core knowledge-sharing niches! We've done well, collectively, but we can do better: we can make richer interactivity, easier-to-use tooling for communication and data structuring, and stronger programming-oriented tools for the complex niche tasks. It's my great hope that wikis will continue to evolve and fill that knowledge-sharing niche with "the human touch" in a world that isn't sure who they can trust anymore. --Brooke Vibber (talk) 16:49, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
• Ward, I was glad to meet you at a Wikipedia meetup. I, too, have been a fellow traveler on the Wiki-Wiki shuttle, but more importantly I am a fervent editor on several Wikis that run on the descendants of the software that you developed. Thank you for changing our lives! Peaceray (talk) 16:53, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• The concept of a wiki is so simple that it's bound to fail - right? How can we trust people to just show up to a website, and improve it? And yet, somehow we made it work by making it easier to do the right thing, than to mess it up. It turned out to be a valuable addition to a set of publishing models, one that enables communities to really work together effectively. And communities, that is what has driven a lot of the valuable content of the internet. Just imagine we would have to depend on companies to provide everything, if everything would need to abide by business models. Wiki's are not for everyone, but the people that run with it, are my kind of people. Thank you for providing the spark that brought these fun and interesting people together! Effeietsanders (talk) 17:31, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you, Ward, for wikis, for the answers, all the questions and all the people. --CristianCantoro (talk) 18:30, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

• Wikis have truly shaped the path of my life and taken it in a new direction — from my very first edit on September 1, 2023, to today. What began as casual editing became a hobby and, later, a profession. Wikis aren’t just about editing; they connect people online and in real life. And it’s fun most of the time. Moreover, seeing what people accomplish by going the Wiki way amazes me. Thank you, Ward, for sparking and shaping this. Happy 30th WikiBirthday! --[[kgh]] (talk) 20:08, 25 March 2025 (UTC) PS: An edit a day keeps boredom away.

• Wikis are amazing and I love them all ! Thank you Ward and everyone involved in those early discussions and creations for a fabulous philosophy for free collaboration and information for everyone. - Liz Henry aka geeklizzard

• Wikis are the true Internet. Accept no substitutes. Thank you to Ward and everyone who had enough faith in humanity to let us help each other out. – Mxn (talk) 00:09, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• Thank you for being, wiki. My friends at http://monochrom.at heard of wikis first in about 2001 and we hosted one to collaboratively design a card game. Once down the rabbit hole, the possibilities were endless. I combined wikis with the semantic web and desktops and started coding personal semantic wikis in 2003 and the semantic desktop, resulting in nepomuk.kde.org 2009. I and others failed to keep this alive, which left a hole. Others did fantastic things with petsonal wikis, like http://www.plomlompom.de/PlomWiki/plomwiki.php . In a wiki, words become pages, sentences connections. Retrieval of knowledge feels more like walking, navigating. An externalized companion to the associative thinking some humans enjoy. A "Denkwerkzeug". I believe the combination of knowlege graps (semantic web/schema.org/rdf/sparql,...) and wikis enabled me connecting my own thoughts with yours. Do you? Leobard (talk) 07:44, 28 March 2025 (UTC)