History of wikis
Encyclopedia
The history of wikis dates from 1994, when Ward Cunningham
invented the concept and gave it its name (he gave the name "WikiWikiWeb
" to both the wiki, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software
that powered it). c2.com thus became the first wiki
, or a website with pages that can be edited via the browser, with a version history for each page. Before 1994, however, there were several historical antecedents to wikis, including Vannevar Bush
's proposed "memex
" system in 1945, the collaborative hypertext database ZOG
in 1972, and the Apple hypertext system HyperCard
in 1987; though the creation of true wikis only became possible with the development of the World Wide Web
in the early 1990s.
Cunningham created the first wiki in 1994, and released it in 1995, in order to facilitate communication between software developers. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle
" at Honolulu International Airport
, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian
word for "quick". The website met with success, and began to spawn alternative wiki applications and websites over the next five years. In the meantime, the first wiki, now known as "WardsWiki", evolved as features were added to the software and as the growing body of users developed a unique "wiki culture". By 2000, WardsWiki had developed a great deal of content outside of its original stated purpose, which led to the spinoff of content into sister sites, most notably MeatballWiki
.
The website Wikipedia
, a free content encyclopedia, was launched in January 2001, and quickly became the most popular wiki, which it remains to this day. Its meteoric rise in popularity (it entered the top ten most popular sites in 2007) played a large part in introducing wikis to the general public. There now exist at least tens of thousands of wiki websites, and they have become increasingly prevalent in corporations and other organizations.
's vision of the "memex
," a microfilm reader which would create automated links between documents. In a 1945 essay in Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think
", Bush described an imaginary future user interface: "Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions… The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined…. Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn…" This vision, though it has been described as predicting the World Wide Web
, resembles wikis more than the web in one important way: the system being described is self-contained, not a loose network.
multi-user database system, developed in 1972 by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University. The ZOG interface consisted of text-only frames, each containing a title, a description, a line with standard ZOG commands, and a set of selections (hypertext links) leading to other frames.
Two members of the ZOG team, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn, spun off a company from CMU in 1981 and developed an improved version of ZOG called Knowledge Management System (KMS). KMS was a collaborative tool based on direct manipulation
, permitting users to modify the contents of frames, freely intermixing text, graphics and images, any of which could be linked to other frames.
Because the database was distributed and accessible from any workstation on a network, changes became visible immediately to other users, enabling them to work concurrently on shared structures (documents, programs, ...).
Three notable hypertext-based systems emerged in the 1980s, that may have been inspired by ZOG, KMS and/or one another: the NoteCards
system, developed in 1984 and released by Xerox
in 1985; Janet Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner
, created in 1985 for the operation manuals of Symbolics
computers; and Bill Atkinson
's WildCard application, on which he began work in 1985, and which was released in 1987 as HyperCard
. Ward Cunningham has stated, that the wiki idea was influenced by his experience using HyperCard: he was shown the software by fellow programmer Kent Beck
, before its official release (it was still called "WildCard" at the time), and, in his words, was "blown away" by it.
Cunningham used HyperCard to make a stack with three kinds of cards:
(One can recognize here the Patterns, People and Projects that are mentioned on the Front Page of Cunningham's original wiki, the WikiWikiWeb.) Cunningham made a single card that would serve for all uses. It had three fields: Name, Description and Links. Cunningham configured the system so that links could be created to cards that didn't exist yet; creating such a link would in turn create a new blank card.
of CERN
built the first hypertext client, which he called World Wide Web (it was also a Web editor), and the first hypertext server (info.cern.ch). In 1991 he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup
, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
Early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories. In May 1992 appeared ViolaWWW
, a graphical browser
providing features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. However, the turning point for the World Wide Web was the introduction of the Mosaic
graphical browser in 1993, which gained wide popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia. In April 1994, CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code for free.
started developing the WikiWikiWeb
in 1994 as a supplement to the Portland Pattern Repository
, a website containing documentation about Design Patterns
, a particular approach to object-oriented programming
.
The WikiWikiWeb was intended as a collaborative database, in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier; it was dedicated to "People, Projects and Patterns". Cunningham wrote the software to run it using the Perl programming language. He considered calling the software "quick-web", but instead named it using the Hawaiian word "wiki-wiki", which means "quick-quick" or "very quick", based on his memory of the Wiki Wiki Shuttle
at Honolulu International Airport
.
Cunningham installed a prototype of the software on his company Cunningham & Cunningham's website c2.com. On March 16, 1995, when the site was functioning, Cunningham sent to a colleague the following email:
Cunningham dates the official start of WikiWikiWeb as March 25, 1995. On May 1, 1995 he sent an email about the website to a number of programmers, which caused an increase in participation. This note was posted to the "Patterns" listserv
, a group of software developers gathered under the name "The Hillside Group
" to develop Erich Gamma
's use of object-oriented patterns. Cunningham had noticed that the older contents of the listserv tended to get buried under the more recent posts, and he proposed instead to collect ideas in a set of pages which would be collectively edited. Cunningham’s post stated: "The plan is to have interested parties write web pages about the People, Projects and Patterns that have changed the way they program." He added: "Think of it as a moderated list where anyone can be moderator and everything is archived. It's not quite a chat, still, conversation is possible."
The site was immediately popular within the pattern community.
Alternate applications for wikis began to emerge, usually imitating the look-and-feel of WikiWikiWeb/Wiki Base; such applications were originally known as "WikiWikiClones". The first one was most likely created by IBM programmer Patrick Mueller, who wrote his in the REXX
language, even before Wiki Base was released.
) community, where they were used for collaboratively discussing and documenting software. However, being used only by specialists, these early software-focused wikis failed to attract widespread public attention.
"ThreadMode" was defined as "a form of discussion where our community holds a conversation." It consists of a series of signed comments added down the page in chronological order. Ward Cunningham generally frowned on ThreadMode, writing: "Chronological is only one of many possible organizations of technical writing and rarely the best one at that."
Cunningham encouraged contributors to "refactor" (rewrite) the ThreadMode discussions into DocumentMode discourse. In practice many pages started out at the top in DocumentMode and degenerated into ThreadMode further down. When ThreadMode became incomprehensible the result was called "ThreadMess". (In most modern wikis the conflict between these two modes has been resolved by putting all document text on the main page of an article, and all discussion text on a talk page.)
The use of categories was proposed by user Stan Silver on August 27, 1996. His initial post suggested: "If everyone adds a category and topic to their page, then the category and topic pages themselves can be used as automatic indexes into the pages."
Initially Silver had proposed both categories and topics: categories denoted the specific nature of the page's subject (a book, a person, a pattern), while topics denoted the theme of the page (Java, extreme programming, Smalltalk). However, people ignored this separation, and topics were collapsed into the categories.
The "ChangeSummary" option began as an aid to telling which changes added interesting new content, and which were just minor adjustments of spelling, punctuation, or correction of web links. It started when some users began taking the RecentChanges page, annotating each line with a brief description of each change, and posting the result to the ChangeSummary page. This practice was highly time-consuming and rapidly petered out, but was replaced by the "MinorEdit/RecentEdits" feature, designed to reduce the RecentChanges clutter.
snowballed, and the disk space consumed by wiki pages more than quadrupuled. With increased participation tensions began to appear.
In 1998 proponents of Extreme Programming
showed up on the site and started posting comments about Extreme Programming on most of the pages related to software development. This annoyed a number people who wanted to talk about patterns, leading to the tag "XpFreeZone", which was put onto pages as a request not to talk about ExtremeProgramming on that page. Eventually most of the DesignPatterns people left to discuss patterns on their own wikis, and WikiWikiWeb began to be referred to as "WardsWiki" instead of the "PortlandPatternRepository".
Around the summer of 1999, user Sam Gentile posted the comment "I'm through here" on his user page, and began systematically removing his text from all pages on WikiWikiWeb that he had contributed to. Gentile worked at Microsoft
and had been hurt by what he perceived as anti-Microsoft bias on WikiWikiWeb. His deletions led to controversy about whether he had the right to remove his own material, and whether others had the right to put it back in (which some began to do). This event became referred to as the "WikiMindWipe".
In April 2000, four WikiWikiWeb users, starting independently, tried to reduce the amount of text on the site via a large number of deletions. They mainly tried to delete material that was related to wikis and not software design patterns. They considered this material to be dead weight, and would have preferred to see it all replaced by concise guidance to newcomers. Contributors who disagreed with these deletions began copying all of the deleted text back in again. A vote was taken on the issue, and it was proposed that any "reductions" should be pre-announced, with an opportunity for response before action is taken.
The longer-term result of the deletions was the formation of WikiWikiWeb "sister sites" later in 2000. Sunir Shah created a wiki called MeatballWiki
, intended strictly for wiki-based documentation and discussions. A few months later, Richard Drake created the WhyClublet (or "Why?") wiki to host discussion of Christian
issues. Many pages were moved from WikiWikiWeb to these alternative sites, with a stub of the moved page left on the WikiWikiWeb, containing a link to the new page and the message: "This page exists only on SisterSites."
In 2001, Cunningham and user Bo Leuf
published a book, The Wiki Way
, which distilled the lessons learned during the collective experience of the first wiki
.
company, sellers of proprietary software. FoxPro Wiki was founded in 1999 by Steven Black and evolved into a popular site with many pages.
World66 was a Dutch company which tried to transform the open content idea into a profitable business. The website was founded in 1999 by Richard and Douwe Osinga. It contains travel-related articles covering destinations around the world.
A wiki forum was created in 1999 for discussion of the newly-created PhpWiki
software. This became one of the larger software-related wikis.
Sensei's Library
, a wiki dedicated to discussion of the game of Go, was created by Morten G. Pahle and Arno Hollosi in October 2000. For its first few years of operation, it was one of the largest and most active wikis on the internet outside of Wikipedia.
made the Wiki Base software available online. One of the early clones was CvWiki, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel, which was the first wiki application to have functioning transclusion
, backlinks, and "WayBackMode".
JWiki (short for JavaWiki) was a web-based wiki software written in Java. JWiki was released in 1997. It had the distinction of being the first implementation of WikiWikiWeb in the Java language, and the first to be back-ended by a database. It was developed by Ricardo Clements, a former co-worker of Cunningham's.
Another early wiki engine was JosWiki, developed by an international group of Java programmers who were trying to create a free and open "Java Operating System" (JOS).
TWiki
was created in Perl
by Peter Thoeny in 1998, based on JosWiki. TWiki was aimed at large corporate intranet
s. It stored data in plain text files instead of in a database.
PikiPiki was created by Martin Pool in 1999 as a rewrite of WikiWikiWeb in Python
. It was made to be a small program, using flat files and doing away with versioning (Pool felt that a wiki is not meant to be a document-management system).
PhpWiki
, created by Steve Wainstead in 1999, was the first wiki software written in PHP
. The initial version was a feature-for-feature reimplementation of the WikiWikiWeb software. Subsequent versions adopted many features from UseModWiki.
Swiki
was written in Squeak
by Mark Guzdial
and Jochen Rick in 1999. It is still used at the Georgia Institute of Technology
.
Zwiki
, written in Python in 1999, is based on the Zope
web application server (it can also co-exist with the Plone content management system). It was initially developed by Simon Michael and Joyful Systems. It uses a ZODB Object Database.
UseModWiki
was developed from 1999 to 2000 by Clifford Adams. UseModWiki is a flat-file wiki written in Perl. It was based on Markus Denker's AtisWiki, which was in turn based on CvWiki. It introduced the square bracket syntax for linking words that was later adopted by many other wiki engines, such as MediaWiki.
MoinMoin
, created in Python by Jürgen Hermann and Thomas Waldmann in mid-2000, was initially based on PikiPiki. It is a flat-file wiki with a simple code base but many possible extensions. MoinMoin uses the idea of separating the parsers (for parsing the wiki syntax) from the formatters (for outputting HTML code), with an interface between them, so that new parsers and output formatters can be written.
Wikipedia was originally conceived as a complement to Nupedia
, a free on-line encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales
, with articles written by highly qualified contributors and evaluated by an elaborate peer review process. The writing of content for Nupedia proved to be extremely slow, with only 12 articles completed during the first year, despite a mailing-list of interested editors and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief recruited by Wales, Larry Sanger
. Learning of the wiki concept, Wales and Sanger decided to try creating a collaborative website to provide an additional source of rapidly-produced draft articles that could be polished for use on Nupedia.
Nupedia's editors and reviewers resisted the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website, so Wikipedia was launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001. It initially ran on UseModWiki
software, with the original text stored in flat-files rather than in a database, and with articles named using the CamelCase
convention. UseModWiki was replaced by a PHP wiki engine in January 2002 and by MediaWiki
in July 2002.
Wikipedia attracted new participants after being mentioned on Slashdot
as well as in an article on the community-edited website Kuro5hin
. It quickly overtook Nupedia. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created.
, was created in December 2002; the site was meant to be a collaboratively-created dictionary.
In June 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation
, a non-profit organization, to manage Wikipedia and all its sister projects going forward. Two additional Wikimedia projects were added soon thereafter: Wikiquote
, a reference for notable quotations, and Wikibooks
, for collaboratively creating textbooks, both in July 2003.
, created by Janne Jalkanen in 2001, is flat-file wiki software built around JavaServer Pages
(JSP). JSPWiki adapted and extended the PhpWiki markup. It is primarily used for company and university intranets as a project wiki or a knowledge management
application. It has also been used as a personal information manager
(PIM).
MediaWiki
was written for Wikipedia in 2002 by Lee Daniel Crocker, based on the user interface design of an earlier PHP wiki engine developed by Magnus Manske. Manske's PHP-based software suffered load problems due to increased use, so Crocker re-wrote the software with a more scalable MySQL
database backend. As Wikipedia grew, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication became a major concern for the developers. Internationalization
was also a major concern (the user interface has been translated into more than 70 languages). One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki and other wiki engines was the use of freely-formatted links instead of links in CamelCase. MediaWiki provides specialized syntax to support rich content, such as rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX
, graphical plotting, image galleries and thumbnails, and Exif metadata
. MediaWiki lacks native WYSIWYG support, but comes with a graphical toolbar to simplify editing. One MediaWiki innovation for structuring content is "namespaces". Namespaces allow each article to contain multiple sheets with different standard names: one sheet presents the encyclopedic content, another contains the discussions surrounding it, and so on.
PmWiki
was created in PHP by Patrick Michaud in 2002. It is a flat-file wiki engine that was designed to be easy to install and customize. PmWiki offers a template scheme that makes it possible to change the look and feel of the wiki. Customization is made easy through a wide selection of custom extensions, known as "recipes" available from the PmWiki Cookbook.
TikiWiki
was created in PHP by Luis Argerich in 2002. It was later renamed "Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware", or simply "Tiki", as it gained additional CMS
and groupware features. TikiWiki is modular with components that can be individually enabled and customized by the administrator, and extends customization to the user with selectable skins and themes.
coWiki
was developed by Daniel T. Gorski in 2002. It was one of the largest projects being developed under PHP5 when that version was still in early development. coWiki used a markup language similar to that of TWiki. It suffered from a mysterious bug called the "bad magic" bug, and became inactive in 2006.
WakkaWiki
, an open-source PHP wiki engine, was created by Carlos Zottman and Hendrik Mans in September 2002. It was discontinued in 2004. WakkaWiki spawned at least five forks: CitiWiki, UniWakka, WackoWiki
, WikiNi and WikkaWiki
.
Socialtext
launched in 2002; it was the first proprietary wiki application aimed at enterprise customers.
XWiki
is an open-source Java wiki application that was created by Ludovic Dubost in January 2003. Dubost set up hosting of XWiki-based wikis on the domain xwiki.com in April 2003 - xwiki.com thus became an early (and possibly the first) wiki hosting service, or "wiki farm".
EditMe
was another early wiki farm, launched in August 2003. The site used proprietary wiki software, written in Java.
As they developed, wikis incorporated many of the features used on other websites and blogs, including:
Around 2005 wikis began to be massively confronted with "wiki spam", produced by spammers who enter website addresses onto wikis in order to improve the ranking of the displayed websites by search engines. Various strategies have been developed to counter wikispam.
rapidly became a popular wiki for discussions of wiki-related topics. The users of MeatballWiki came up with several ideas on the linking together of wikis, including:
Some of these ideas were later implemented. For example, WikiIndex, a wiki that lists other wikis, was created in 2006, in an attempt to implement the MetaWiki and SwitchWiki ideas.
Disinfopedia was launched by Sheldon Rampton in March 2003. It aimed to produce a directory of public relations firms and industry-funded organizations that attempt to influence public opinion and public policy. It was later renamed SourceWatch
, and is currently run by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Javapedia
is a wiki inspired by Wikipedia. The project was launched in June 2003 during the JavaOne developer conference; it is intended to cover all aspects of the Java
platform.
Wikitravel
was started in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins.
Memory Alpha
is a wiki devoted to the Star Trek
fictional universe. It was launched by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in December 2003. For its first several years, it was one of the largest wiki projects.
This period also saw the creation of several other general wiki encyclopedias, created either independently of Wikipedia or meant to serve as an alternative to Wikipedia in order to fix some perceived weakness in it:
2004 saw the launch of two major proprietary wiki applications: Confluence
in March and JotSpot in October. Like Socialtext before them, the two launched with major corporate backing and venture capital, and geared themselves heavily toward corporate usage. JotSpot was bought by Google
in 2006 for an undisclosed amount (Google would later release the technology, in modified form, as Google Sites
in 2008).
In October 2004, the wiki hosting service Wikicities launched, co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation board member Angela Beesley. In March 2006, it changed its name to Wikia
. Wikia remains the best-known and most popular wiki farm.
A large number of other notable wiki farms were released soon afterward, including Wikispaces
(launched March 2005), PBwiki (launched June 2005, later renamed PBworks) and Wetpaint
(launched October 2005). Wikidot
was launched in August 2006.
2005 marked the beginning of large-scale wiki-related meetings and conferences. August 2005 saw the first-ever Wikimania
, an annual conference organized around Wikimedia Foundation projects, in Frankfurt
, Germany
. WikiSym
, a more academic annual symposium about wikis in general, was first held a few months later, in October 2005, in San Diego, California
. RecentChangesCamp
, an unconference
dedicated to wikis, was first held in February 2006 in Portland, Oregon
. Wikimania and WikiSym remain the two largest wiki-related gatherings.
Hybrid applications that combined wikis with other functionality began to emerge during this period. Trac
, a project management
and bug tracking tool that includes wiki functionality, was first released in February 2004. wikiCalc
, a wiki-based spreadsheet
application, was launched in November 2005 by spreadsheet pioneer Dan Bricklin. Redmine
, an application similar to Trac, was created in June 2006.
In 2005 a number of semantic wiki
applications were launched, including the currently best-known one, Semantic MediaWiki
(which was first announced at Wikimania 2005).
Other notable wiki applications created during this time period were DokuWiki
(released June 2004) and MindTouch DekiWiki (released June 2006). DekiWiki was later renamed to "Deki", then to MindTouch Core. Jive Software
released the proprietary application Clearspace in December 2006; it was later renamed "Jive SBS", and then Jive Engage.
In November 2006 Microsoft
released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which added wiki functionality (along with blog
functionality and other features) to the product.
rankings from the top 1000 websites into the top 15. It was named one of the top 5 global brands of 2006 in the Brandchannel
Readers' Choice Awards.
In 2004 the Wikimedia Foundation launched three new sites: Wikispecies
, for cataloging species, in August 2004, Wikimedia Commons
, to hold images and other media used by the Wikimedia projects, in September 2004, and Wikinews
, for publishing collaborative news articles, in December 2004. Wikiversity
, intended for tutorials and other courseware, was later launched in August 2006.
In November 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler
wrote a much-publicized article in USA Today
about Wikipedia's article about him, which for over four months had contained a false statement about him, inserted as a joke, stating that he had been a suspect in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy
and Robert F. Kennedy
. The USA Today article generated a subsequent controversy
that both caused Wikipedia to tighten its standards for creating articles, especially articles about living people, and highlighted the growing importance of Wikipedia as a source of information.
During this period, Wikipedia also began to enter the popular culture. A prominent example was the Weird Al Yankovic parody song "White & Nerdy
", which peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100
in late 2006, and contained the lyric "I edit Wikipedia". In December 2006, Time
magazine chose "You
" as their Person of the Year, referring to the rise of Web 2.0
and web technologies that allow for user-contributed content, and cited Wikipedia as one of the key websites that allow for "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before."
, a website to create an open-source street map of the world using wiki functionality, was launched.
Most of the major satirical
wikis launched at around this time. Encyclopedia Dramatica
, which mocked internet culture, was founded in December 2004 (it was shut down in April 2011). Stupidedia
, a German-language
wiki intended as a direct parody of Wikipedia, was also founded in December 2004, a week later. Uncyclopedia
, an English-language wiki also intended to parody Wikipedia, was founded the next month, in January 2005; it was later extended to dozens of other languages, and merged in other wikis, including Stupidedia. La Frikipedia
, a Spanish-language
parody of Wikipedia, was founded in October 2005.
wikiHow
, a popular how-to website, launched in April 2006.
Two major Chinese
wiki encyclopedias began in 2006: Baidu Baike
in April and Hudong in November. Both currently hold millions of articles, and exceed the popularity of the Chinese Wikipedia
within China. Both are for-profit wikis, that, unlike Wikipedia, hold the copyright to their own content.
.
In 2007, Wikipedia entered the top 10 most popular websites in the world. Wikipedia began to be heavily referenced in television and other media during 2007; see Wikipedia in culture
.
In January 2007, DBpedia
was launched: a project to publish structured data from Wikipedia in machine-readable, queriable form. By 2008, it became a major component of the Linked Data
initiative.
Also in January 2007, Amazon.com
released Amapedia
, a product-review wiki on its own website (Amapedia was later shut down in June 2010).
In March 2007, Larry Sanger
, co-founder of Wikipedia, launched Citizendium
, an "expert-guided" encyclopedia wiki requiring participants to use their real names.
In August 2008, then-U.S. presidential candidate John McCain
was accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in a speech about Georgia
. In June 2009, journalist Chris Anderson
admitted to plagiarizing a series of Wikipedia articles in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
; he called it a "screwup," based on lack of clarity on how to cite a specific version of a Wikipedia article.
In October 2008, many of the developers of TWiki left the project to work on a fork of the code, which they named Foswiki, after creator Peter Thoeny took control of the TWiki code and trademark via his company, TWiki.net.
In May 2009, Google announced its Google Wave
platform (and its associated Federation protocol
), which would combine the functionality of wikis with e-mail, instant messaging and social networking in order to provide a collaborative, real-time, server-hosted communication platform. Google Wave was released to the general public in May 2010, but development on it was ended several months later, in August 2010. In December 2010, Google transferred control of the software's development to the Apache Foundation, and it was renamed "Apache Wave".
In 2010, the site WikiLeaks
(which had been founded in 2006) gained a great deal of both fame and notoriety as a result of a set of leaked documents the site published of classified materials from the United States government, notably footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike
, the Afghan War documents leak and the United States diplomatic cables leak
. The site runs on the MediaWiki application, and began as a wiki editable by anyone, but in 2010 had its permissions changed so that only its administrators could edit pages.
In December 2010, wiki functionality was added to the SAP NetWeaver Portal application.
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
invented the concept and gave it its name (he gave the name "WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...
" to both the wiki, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software
Wiki software
Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers...
that powered it). c2.com thus became the first wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
, or a website with pages that can be edited via the browser, with a version history for each page. Before 1994, however, there were several historical antecedents to wikis, including Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's proposed "memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
" system in 1945, the collaborative hypertext database ZOG
ZOG (hypertext)
ZOG was an early hypertext system developed at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1970s by Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn. ZOG was first developed by Allen Newell and George Robertson to serve as the front end for AI and Cognitive Science programs brought together at CMU for a summer workshop...
in 1972, and the Apple hypertext system HyperCard
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...
in 1987; though the creation of true wikis only became possible with the development of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
in the early 1990s.
Cunningham created the first wiki in 1994, and released it in 1995, in order to facilitate communication between software developers. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle
Wiki Wiki Shuttle
The Wiki Wiki Shuttle is a zero-fare shuttle bus system at the Honolulu International Airport. Shuttles run between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals....
" at Honolulu International Airport
Honolulu International Airport
Honolulu International Airport is the principal aviation gateway of the City & County of Honolulu and the State of Hawaii and is identified as one of the busiest airports in the United States, with traffic now exceeding 21 million passengers a year and rising.It is located in the Honolulu...
, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian
Hawaiian language
The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
word for "quick". The website met with success, and began to spawn alternative wiki applications and websites over the next five years. In the meantime, the first wiki, now known as "WardsWiki", evolved as features were added to the software and as the growing body of users developed a unique "wiki culture". By 2000, WardsWiki had developed a great deal of content outside of its original stated purpose, which led to the spinoff of content into sister sites, most notably MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs....
.
The website Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, a free content encyclopedia, was launched in January 2001, and quickly became the most popular wiki, which it remains to this day. Its meteoric rise in popularity (it entered the top ten most popular sites in 2007) played a large part in introducing wikis to the general public. There now exist at least tens of thousands of wiki websites, and they have become increasingly prevalent in corporations and other organizations.
Pre-1994
A distant precursor of the wiki concept was Vannevar BushVannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's vision of the "memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
," a microfilm reader which would create automated links between documents. In a 1945 essay in Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
", Bush described an imaginary future user interface: "Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions… The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined…. Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn…" This vision, though it has been described as predicting the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, resembles wikis more than the web in one important way: the system being described is self-contained, not a loose network.
Pre-World-Wide-Web hypertext systems
An indirect precursor of the wiki concept was the ZOGZOG (hypertext)
ZOG was an early hypertext system developed at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1970s by Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn. ZOG was first developed by Allen Newell and George Robertson to serve as the front end for AI and Cognitive Science programs brought together at CMU for a summer workshop...
multi-user database system, developed in 1972 by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University. The ZOG interface consisted of text-only frames, each containing a title, a description, a line with standard ZOG commands, and a set of selections (hypertext links) leading to other frames.
Two members of the ZOG team, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn, spun off a company from CMU in 1981 and developed an improved version of ZOG called Knowledge Management System (KMS). KMS was a collaborative tool based on direct manipulation
Direct manipulation interface
In computer science, direct manipulation is a human-computer interaction style which involves continuous representation of objects of interest, and rapid, reversible, incremental actions and feedback. The intention is to allow a user to directly manipulate objects presented to them, using actions...
, permitting users to modify the contents of frames, freely intermixing text, graphics and images, any of which could be linked to other frames.
Because the database was distributed and accessible from any workstation on a network, changes became visible immediately to other users, enabling them to work concurrently on shared structures (documents, programs, ...).
Three notable hypertext-based systems emerged in the 1980s, that may have been inspired by ZOG, KMS and/or one another: the NoteCards
NoteCards
NoteCards was a hypertext personal knowledge basesystem developed at Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards developed after Trigg became the first to write a Ph.D. thesis on hypertext while at the University of Maryland College Park in 1983...
system, developed in 1984 and released by Xerox
Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
in 1985; Janet Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner
Symbolics Document Examiner
Symbolics Document Examiner was a powerful and early hypertext system developed at Symbolics by Janet Walker in 1985...
, created in 1985 for the operation manuals of Symbolics
Symbolics
Symbolics refers to two companies: now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.The symbolics.com domain was...
computers; and Bill Atkinson
Bill Atkinson
Bill Atkinson is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, San Diego, where Apple Macintosh developer Jef Raskin was one of his professors...
's WildCard application, on which he began work in 1985, and which was released in 1987 as HyperCard
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...
. Ward Cunningham has stated, that the wiki idea was influenced by his experience using HyperCard: he was shown the software by fellow programmer Kent Beck
Kent Beck
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001....
, before its official release (it was still called "WildCard" at the time), and, in his words, was "blown away" by it.
Cunningham used HyperCard to make a stack with three kinds of cards:
- cards for ideas,
- cards for people who hold ideas,
- cards for projects where people share ideas.
(One can recognize here the Patterns, People and Projects that are mentioned on the Front Page of Cunningham's original wiki, the WikiWikiWeb.) Cunningham made a single card that would serve for all uses. It had three fields: Name, Description and Links. Cunningham configured the system so that links could be created to cards that didn't exist yet; creating such a link would in turn create a new blank card.
The World Wide Web
In 1990, Tim Berners-LeeTim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
of CERN
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...
built the first hypertext client, which he called World Wide Web (it was also a Web editor), and the first hypertext server (info.cern.ch). In 1991 he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
Early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories. In May 1992 appeared ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web...
, a graphical browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
providing features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. However, the turning point for the World Wide Web was the introduction of the Mosaic
Mosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
graphical browser in 1993, which gained wide popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia. In April 1994, CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code for free.
WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki
Ward CunninghamWard Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
started developing the WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...
in 1994 as a supplement to the Portland Pattern Repository
Portland Pattern Repository
The Portland Pattern Repository is a repository for computer programming design patterns. It was accompanied by a companion website, WikiWikiWeb, which was the world's first wiki....
, a website containing documentation about Design Patterns
Design Patterns
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software is a software engineering book describing recurring solutions to common problems in software design. The book's authors are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides with a foreword by Grady Booch. The authors are...
, a particular approach to object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
.
The WikiWikiWeb was intended as a collaborative database, in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier; it was dedicated to "People, Projects and Patterns". Cunningham wrote the software to run it using the Perl programming language. He considered calling the software "quick-web", but instead named it using the Hawaiian word "wiki-wiki", which means "quick-quick" or "very quick", based on his memory of the Wiki Wiki Shuttle
Wiki Wiki Shuttle
The Wiki Wiki Shuttle is a zero-fare shuttle bus system at the Honolulu International Airport. Shuttles run between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals....
at Honolulu International Airport
Honolulu International Airport
Honolulu International Airport is the principal aviation gateway of the City & County of Honolulu and the State of Hawaii and is identified as one of the busiest airports in the United States, with traffic now exceeding 21 million passengers a year and rising.It is located in the Honolulu...
.
Cunningham installed a prototype of the software on his company Cunningham & Cunningham's website c2.com. On March 16, 1995, when the site was functioning, Cunningham sent to a colleague the following email:
- Steve – I've put up a new database on my web server and I'd like you to take a look. It's a web of people, projects and patterns accessed through a cgi-bin script. It has a forms based authoring capability that doesn't require familiarity with html. I'd be very pleased if you would get on and at least enter your name in RecentVisitors. I'm asking you because I think you might also add some interesting content. I'm going to advertise this a little more widely in a week or so. The URL is http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki. Thanks and best regards. – Ward
Cunningham dates the official start of WikiWikiWeb as March 25, 1995. On May 1, 1995 he sent an email about the website to a number of programmers, which caused an increase in participation. This note was posted to the "Patterns" listserv
LISTSERV
LISTSERV was the first electronic mailing list software application, consisting of a set of email addresses for a group in which the sender can send one email and it will reach a variety of people...
, a group of software developers gathered under the name "The Hillside Group
The Hillside Group
The Hillside Group is an educational nonprofit organization established in August 1993. The Hillside Group was formed to help software developers to consider and document common development and design problems in the form of patterns...
" to develop Erich Gamma
Erich Gamma
Erich Gamma is Swiss computer scientist and co-author of the influential Software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. He co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework with Kent Beck and led the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools...
's use of object-oriented patterns. Cunningham had noticed that the older contents of the listserv tended to get buried under the more recent posts, and he proposed instead to collect ideas in a set of pages which would be collectively edited. Cunningham’s post stated: "The plan is to have interested parties write web pages about the People, Projects and Patterns that have changed the way they program." He added: "Think of it as a moderated list where anyone can be moderator and everything is archived. It's not quite a chat, still, conversation is possible."
The site was immediately popular within the pattern community.
Release of the Wiki Base software
Ward Cunningham wrote a version of his wiki software meant for public usage, called "Wiki Base". In his announcement, he wrote: "WikiWikiWeb is almost public. Actually, a pretty good clone of it is public at: http://c2.com/cgi/wikibase. I've translated almost all of the actual wiki script into HyperPerl, a wiki-literate programming system that I think you will like." Visitors were requested to register on the wiki before they took the Wiki Base code. Cunningham expected users to fold changes back into his editable version, but those who implemented changes generally chose to distribute the modified versions on their own sites.Alternate applications for wikis began to emerge, usually imitating the look-and-feel of WikiWikiWeb/Wiki Base; such applications were originally known as "WikiWikiClones". The first one was most likely created by IBM programmer Patrick Mueller, who wrote his in the REXX
REXX
REXX is an interpreted programming language that was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language that was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read...
language, even before Wiki Base was released.
Early wiki websites for software development
Inspired by the example of the WikiWikiWeb, programmers soon started several other wikis to build knowledge bases about programming topics. Wikis became popular in the free and open-source software (FOSSFoss
Foss may refer toPeople*Foss , people with the last name Foss*Foss Shanahan , New Zealand diplomat*Foss Westcott , English bishop...
) community, where they were used for collaboratively discussing and documenting software. However, being used only by specialists, these early software-focused wikis failed to attract widespread public attention.
Growth and innovations in WikiWikiWeb from 1995 to 2000
The WikiWikiWeb website approximately doubled in size every year 1995 to 2000, with disk usage rising from around 2 megabytes in 1995 to around 60 megabytes at the end of 2000. During that time, various innovations were put in place, many suggested by users, to help with navigation and editing. These included:- 1995 - RecentVisitors, PeopleIndex: pages to help users know who was contributing
- 1995 - NotSoRecentChanges: excess lines from the RecentChanges page were (manually) copied to a file of "ChangesIn
" - 1996 - EditCopy: offers the possibility to edit the backup copy of a page (this was replaced in 2002 with Page History)
- 1996 - ThreadMode: the form of a page where community members hold a discussion, each signing their own contribution
- 1996 - WikiCategories: categories can be added as an automatic index to pages
- 1997 - RoadMaps: proposed lists of pages to consult about specific topics, such as the Algorithms RoadMap or the Leadership RoadMap
- 1999 - ChangeSummary: an aid to telling which changes added interesting new content and which were only minor
- 2000 - UserName: the Wiki will accept a cookie that specifies a User Name to be used in place of the host name (IP identity) in the RecentChanges log
"ThreadMode" was defined as "a form of discussion where our community holds a conversation." It consists of a series of signed comments added down the page in chronological order. Ward Cunningham generally frowned on ThreadMode, writing: "Chronological is only one of many possible organizations of technical writing and rarely the best one at that."
Cunningham encouraged contributors to "refactor" (rewrite) the ThreadMode discussions into DocumentMode discourse. In practice many pages started out at the top in DocumentMode and degenerated into ThreadMode further down. When ThreadMode became incomprehensible the result was called "ThreadMess". (In most modern wikis the conflict between these two modes has been resolved by putting all document text on the main page of an article, and all discussion text on a talk page.)
The use of categories was proposed by user Stan Silver on August 27, 1996. His initial post suggested: "If everyone adds a category and topic to their page, then the category and topic pages themselves can be used as automatic indexes into the pages."
Initially Silver had proposed both categories and topics: categories denoted the specific nature of the page's subject (a book, a person, a pattern), while topics denoted the theme of the page (Java, extreme programming, Smalltalk). However, people ignored this separation, and topics were collapsed into the categories.
The "ChangeSummary" option began as an aid to telling which changes added interesting new content, and which were just minor adjustments of spelling, punctuation, or correction of web links. It started when some users began taking the RecentChanges page, annotating each line with a brief description of each change, and posting the result to the ChangeSummary page. This practice was highly time-consuming and rapidly petered out, but was replaced by the "MinorEdit/RecentEdits" feature, designed to reduce the RecentChanges clutter.
Tensions within WikiWikiWeb and the creation of spinoff sites
Between early 1998 and the end of 2000 participation in WikiWikiWebWikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...
snowballed, and the disk space consumed by wiki pages more than quadrupuled. With increased participation tensions began to appear.
In 1998 proponents of Extreme Programming
Extreme Programming
Extreme programming is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements...
showed up on the site and started posting comments about Extreme Programming on most of the pages related to software development. This annoyed a number people who wanted to talk about patterns, leading to the tag "XpFreeZone", which was put onto pages as a request not to talk about ExtremeProgramming on that page. Eventually most of the DesignPatterns people left to discuss patterns on their own wikis, and WikiWikiWeb began to be referred to as "WardsWiki" instead of the "PortlandPatternRepository".
Around the summer of 1999, user Sam Gentile posted the comment "I'm through here" on his user page, and began systematically removing his text from all pages on WikiWikiWeb that he had contributed to. Gentile worked at Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and had been hurt by what he perceived as anti-Microsoft bias on WikiWikiWeb. His deletions led to controversy about whether he had the right to remove his own material, and whether others had the right to put it back in (which some began to do). This event became referred to as the "WikiMindWipe".
In April 2000, four WikiWikiWeb users, starting independently, tried to reduce the amount of text on the site via a large number of deletions. They mainly tried to delete material that was related to wikis and not software design patterns. They considered this material to be dead weight, and would have preferred to see it all replaced by concise guidance to newcomers. Contributors who disagreed with these deletions began copying all of the deleted text back in again. A vote was taken on the issue, and it was proposed that any "reductions" should be pre-announced, with an opportunity for response before action is taken.
The longer-term result of the deletions was the formation of WikiWikiWeb "sister sites" later in 2000. Sunir Shah created a wiki called MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs....
, intended strictly for wiki-based documentation and discussions. A few months later, Richard Drake created the WhyClublet (or "Why?") wiki to host discussion of Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
issues. Many pages were moved from WikiWikiWeb to these alternative sites, with a stub of the moved page left on the WikiWikiWeb, containing a link to the new page and the message: "This page exists only on SisterSites."
In 2001, Cunningham and user Bo Leuf
Bo Leuf
Bo Arne Leuf was the author of the book The Wiki Way , written in collaboration with WikiWiki inventor Ward Cunningham. His book Peer To Peer discusses different P2P solutions both from a technical and legal point of view.Bo Leuf lived in Gothenburg, Sweden...
published a book, The Wiki Way
The Wiki Way
The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web is a 2001 book about wikis by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. It was the first major book published about using wikis. Cunningham is the inventor of wikis, having created WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki website software...
, which distilled the lessons learned during the collective experience of the first wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
.
Other wiki websites, 1999–2000
While many early wiki websites were devoted to the development of open source software, one early wiki was created by the FoxProFoxPro
' has two meanings:*Visual FoxPro, an object-oriented programming language and RDBMS, published by Microsoft, for Microsoft Windows*FoxPro 2, a text-based procedural programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh,...
company, sellers of proprietary software. FoxPro Wiki was founded in 1999 by Steven Black and evolved into a popular site with many pages.
World66 was a Dutch company which tried to transform the open content idea into a profitable business. The website was founded in 1999 by Richard and Douwe Osinga. It contains travel-related articles covering destinations around the world.
A wiki forum was created in 1999 for discussion of the newly-created PhpWiki
PhpWiki
PhpWiki is a web-based wiki software application.It began as a clone of WikiWikiWeb and was the first wiki written in PHP.PhpWiki has been used to edit and format paper books for publication.-History:...
software. This became one of the larger software-related wikis.
Sensei's Library
Sensei's Library
Sensei's Library is an internet website and wiki, dedicated to articles about, and discussion of, the game of Go. It is one of the largest and most active wikis outside of the Wikipedia project on the internet. Sensei's Library was started in September 2000, by the Go players Morten Pahle and Arno...
, a wiki dedicated to discussion of the game of Go, was created by Morten G. Pahle and Arno Hollosi in October 2000. For its first few years of operation, it was one of the largest and most active wikis on the internet outside of Wikipedia.
Other wiki applications, 1997–2000
Clones of the WikiWikiWeb software began to be developed as soon as Ward CunninghamWard Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
made the Wiki Base software available online. One of the early clones was CvWiki, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel, which was the first wiki application to have functioning transclusion
Transclusion
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
, backlinks, and "WayBackMode".
JWiki (short for JavaWiki) was a web-based wiki software written in Java. JWiki was released in 1997. It had the distinction of being the first implementation of WikiWikiWeb in the Java language, and the first to be back-ended by a database. It was developed by Ricardo Clements, a former co-worker of Cunningham's.
Another early wiki engine was JosWiki, developed by an international group of Java programmers who were trying to create a free and open "Java Operating System" (JOS).
TWiki
TWiki
TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal...
was created in Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
by Peter Thoeny in 1998, based on JosWiki. TWiki was aimed at large corporate intranet
Intranet
An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to securely share any part of an organization's information or network operating system within that organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network...
s. It stored data in plain text files instead of in a database.
PikiPiki was created by Martin Pool in 1999 as a rewrite of WikiWikiWeb in Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
. It was made to be a small program, using flat files and doing away with versioning (Pool felt that a wiki is not meant to be a document-management system).
PhpWiki
PhpWiki
PhpWiki is a web-based wiki software application.It began as a clone of WikiWikiWeb and was the first wiki written in PHP.PhpWiki has been used to edit and format paper books for publication.-History:...
, created by Steve Wainstead in 1999, was the first wiki software written in PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
. The initial version was a feature-for-feature reimplementation of the WikiWikiWeb software. Subsequent versions adopted many features from UseModWiki.
Swiki
Swiki
Swiki is wiki software written in Squeak. It is used heavily by the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing. It is also used in K-12 education and has been used successfully with 4th graders and higher...
was written in Squeak
Squeak
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation. It is object-oriented, class-based and reflective.It was derived directly from Smalltalk-80 by a group at Apple Computer that included some of the original Smalltalk-80 developers...
by Mark Guzdial
Mark Guzdial
Mark Joseph Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the College of Computing and the GVU Center. He is best known for his research in the fields of computer science education and the learning sciences...
and Jochen Rick in 1999. It is still used at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...
.
Zwiki
Zwiki
Zwiki is a wiki engine written in Python and based on the Zope web application server. It was developed by Joyful Systems and contributors from around the world, and is free software released under the GNU General Public License....
, written in Python in 1999, is based on the Zope
Zope
Zope is a free and open-source, object-oriented Web application server written in the Python programming language. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web...
web application server (it can also co-exist with the Plone content management system). It was initially developed by Simon Michael and Joyful Systems. It uses a ZODB Object Database.
UseModWiki
UseModWiki
UseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
was developed from 1999 to 2000 by Clifford Adams. UseModWiki is a flat-file wiki written in Perl. It was based on Markus Denker's AtisWiki, which was in turn based on CvWiki. It introduced the square bracket syntax for linking words that was later adopted by many other wiki engines, such as MediaWiki.
MoinMoin
MoinMoin
MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. The MoinMoin code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2, or any later version .A number of organizations use MoinMoin to run public wikis,...
, created in Python by Jürgen Hermann and Thomas Waldmann in mid-2000, was initially based on PikiPiki. It is a flat-file wiki with a simple code base but many possible extensions. MoinMoin uses the idea of separating the parsers (for parsing the wiki syntax) from the formatters (for outputting HTML code), with an interface between them, so that new parsers and output formatters can be written.
The creation of Wikipedia
Until 2001, wikis were virtually unknown outside of the restricted circles of computer programmers. Wikis were introduced to the general public by the success of Wikipedia, a free content encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.Wikipedia was originally conceived as a complement to Nupedia
Nupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
, a free on-line encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, with articles written by highly qualified contributors and evaluated by an elaborate peer review process. The writing of content for Nupedia proved to be extremely slow, with only 12 articles completed during the first year, despite a mailing-list of interested editors and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief recruited by Wales, Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
. Learning of the wiki concept, Wales and Sanger decided to try creating a collaborative website to provide an additional source of rapidly-produced draft articles that could be polished for use on Nupedia.
Nupedia's editors and reviewers resisted the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website, so Wikipedia was launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001. It initially ran on UseModWiki
UseModWiki
UseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
software, with the original text stored in flat-files rather than in a database, and with articles named using the CamelCase
CamelCase
CamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
convention. UseModWiki was replaced by a PHP wiki engine in January 2002 and by MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
in July 2002.
Wikipedia attracted new participants after being mentioned on Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
as well as in an article on the community-edited website Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin is a collaborative discussion website. Articles are created and submitted by Kuro5hin's users and submitted to queue for evaluation. Site members can vote for or against publishing an article and, once the article has reached a certain number of votes, it is then published to the site...
. It quickly overtook Nupedia. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created.
Wikimedia Foundation and first Wikipedia sister projects
Wales, and other members of the Wikipedia user community, founded Wikipedia's first "sister site", "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki," in October 2002; it detailed the September 11 attacks. (This project was closed in October 2006.) A second sister site, WiktionaryWiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
, was created in December 2002; the site was meant to be a collaboratively-created dictionary.
In June 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
, a non-profit organization, to manage Wikipedia and all its sister projects going forward. Two additional Wikimedia projects were added soon thereafter: Wikiquote
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books,...
, a reference for notable quotations, and Wikibooks
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is a Wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit....
, for collaboratively creating textbooks, both in July 2003.
Development of wiki software, 2001–2003
JSPWikiJSPWiki
JSPWiki is wiki software built around the standard J2EE components of Java, servlets and JSP. It was written by Janne Jalkanen and released under the LGPL. It is currently undergoing incubation with Apache and its license has been changed to the Apache License. The Sun Java System Portal Server...
, created by Janne Jalkanen in 2001, is flat-file wiki software built around JavaServer Pages
JavaServer Pages
JavaServer Pages is a Java technology that helps software developers serve dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types...
(JSP). JSPWiki adapted and extended the PhpWiki markup. It is primarily used for company and university intranets as a project wiki or a knowledge management
Knowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
application. It has also been used as a personal information manager
Personal information manager
A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...
(PIM).
MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
was written for Wikipedia in 2002 by Lee Daniel Crocker, based on the user interface design of an earlier PHP wiki engine developed by Magnus Manske. Manske's PHP-based software suffered load problems due to increased use, so Crocker re-wrote the software with a more scalable MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
database backend. As Wikipedia grew, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication became a major concern for the developers. Internationalization
Internationalization
In economics, internationalization has been viewed as a process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization or international entrepreneurship...
was also a major concern (the user interface has been translated into more than 70 languages). One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki and other wiki engines was the use of freely-formatted links instead of links in CamelCase. MediaWiki provides specialized syntax to support rich content, such as rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
, graphical plotting, image galleries and thumbnails, and Exif metadata
Exchangeable image file format
Exchangeable image file format is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras , scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras...
. MediaWiki lacks native WYSIWYG support, but comes with a graphical toolbar to simplify editing. One MediaWiki innovation for structuring content is "namespaces". Namespaces allow each article to contain multiple sheets with different standard names: one sheet presents the encyclopedic content, another contains the discussions surrounding it, and so on.
PmWiki
PmWiki
PmWiki is wiki software written by Patrick R. Michaud in the PHP programming language. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.-Design focus:...
was created in PHP by Patrick Michaud in 2002. It is a flat-file wiki engine that was designed to be easy to install and customize. PmWiki offers a template scheme that makes it possible to change the look and feel of the wiki. Customization is made easy through a wide selection of custom extensions, known as "recipes" available from the PmWiki Cookbook.
TikiWiki
TikiWiki
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, originally and more commonly known as TikiWiki or simply Tiki, is a free and open source wiki-based, content management system and Online office suite written primarily in PHP and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License license...
was created in PHP by Luis Argerich in 2002. It was later renamed "Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware", or simply "Tiki", as it gained additional CMS
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...
and groupware features. TikiWiki is modular with components that can be individually enabled and customized by the administrator, and extends customization to the user with selectable skins and themes.
coWiki
CoWiki
coWiki is an inactive wiki engine implemented in PHP 5 and using a MySQL database. It is licenced under the GNU General Public License. coWiki uses a markup language similar to that of TWiki....
was developed by Daniel T. Gorski in 2002. It was one of the largest projects being developed under PHP5 when that version was still in early development. coWiki used a markup language similar to that of TWiki. It suffered from a mysterious bug called the "bad magic" bug, and became inactive in 2006.
WakkaWiki
WakkaWiki
WakkaWiki is a very small wiki engine written in PHP that is easy to install, hack, and maintain. It was originally developed by Hendrik Mans, creator of the PlanetCrap discussion community, with help from Carlo Zottmann....
, an open-source PHP wiki engine, was created by Carlos Zottman and Hendrik Mans in September 2002. It was discontinued in 2004. WakkaWiki spawned at least five forks: CitiWiki, UniWakka, WackoWiki
WackoWiki
WackoWiki is a small, lightweight, handy, expandable, multilingual Wiki-engine based on Wakka Wiki written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. WackoWiki has an with support for multiple languages, easy installer, many localizations, email notification on changes/comments, several cache...
, WikiNi and WikkaWiki
WikkaWiki
WikkaWiki is a free, lightweight, and standards-compliant wiki engine. Written in PHP, it uses MySQL to store pages. WikkaWiki is a fork of Wakka Wiki to which a number of new features have been added...
.
Socialtext
Socialtext
Socialtext Incorporated is a company based in Palo Alto, California that produces enterprise social software, comprising an integrated suite of web-based social software applications including microblogging, user profile, directories, groups, personal dashboards using OpenSocial widgets, and shared...
launched in 2002; it was the first proprietary wiki application aimed at enterprise customers.
XWiki
XWiki
XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki Enterprise, the enterprise wiki edition, includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenOffice based document import/export, semantic annotations and tagging, and advanced permissions management.As an application...
is an open-source Java wiki application that was created by Ludovic Dubost in January 2003. Dubost set up hosting of XWiki-based wikis on the domain xwiki.com in April 2003 - xwiki.com thus became an early (and possibly the first) wiki hosting service, or "wiki farm".
EditMe
EditMe
EditMe is a wiki hosting service based in Westborough, Massachusetts. The service launched in August 2003, and the company officially incorporated in November 2005...
was another early wiki farm, launched in August 2003. The site used proprietary wiki software, written in Java.
As they developed, wikis incorporated many of the features used on other websites and blogs, including:
- support for various wiki markup styles
- editing of pages with a GUI editor, WYSIWYG, ad specific applications such as LaTeX
- optional use of external editors
- support for plugins and custom extensions
- use of RSS feeds
- integrated email discussion
- precise access control
- spam protection
Around 2005 wikis began to be massively confronted with "wiki spam", produced by spammers who enter website addresses onto wikis in order to improve the ranking of the displayed websites by search engines. Various strategies have been developed to counter wikispam.
Other wiki websites, 2001–2003
MeatballWikiMeatballWiki
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs....
rapidly became a popular wiki for discussions of wiki-related topics. The users of MeatballWiki came up with several ideas on the linking together of wikis, including:
- InterWikiMap, a simple interwiki linking system (2000) MetaWiki, the idea of a wiki that helps people find other wikis
- OneBigWiki (2002), the idea of having one wiki distributed across several servers
- SwitchWiki (2003): the idea of having one site where one can switch between wikis
- WikiNode, a way to link wikis via a standard "node" page on each
Some of these ideas were later implemented. For example, WikiIndex, a wiki that lists other wikis, was created in 2006, in an attempt to implement the MetaWiki and SwitchWiki ideas.
Disinfopedia was launched by Sheldon Rampton in March 2003. It aimed to produce a directory of public relations firms and industry-funded organizations that attempt to influence public opinion and public policy. It was later renamed SourceWatch
SourceWatch
SourceWatch is an internet wiki site that is a collaborative project of the liberal Center for Media and Democracy...
, and is currently run by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Javapedia
Javapedia
The Javapedia project was launched in June 2003 during the JavaOne developer conference. It is part of . The website is promoted by Sun Microsystems as the central meeting place for the Java community....
is a wiki inspired by Wikipedia. The project was launched in June 2003 during the JavaOne developer conference; it is intended to cover all aspects of the Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
platform.
Wikitravel
Wikitravel
-External links:* *...
was started in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins.
Memory Alpha
Memory Alpha
Memory Alpha is a wiki that is an encyclopedic reference for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Wikia, Inc. on the MediaWiki...
is a wiki devoted to the Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
fictional universe. It was launched by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in December 2003. For its first several years, it was one of the largest wiki projects.
This period also saw the creation of several other general wiki encyclopedias, created either independently of Wikipedia or meant to serve as an alternative to Wikipedia in order to fix some perceived weakness in it:
- Susning.nuSusning.nuSusning.nu was a Swedish language wiki, started in October 2001 by Lars Aronsson . In its first three years , Susning.nu ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit...
was a Swedish-language wiki, created in October 2001, meant to serve as an encyclopedia, dictionary, and discussion forum. - Enciclopedia LibreEnciclopedia LibreEnciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.-History:...
was created in February 2002 as a fork of the Spanish-language WikipediaSpanish WikipediaThe Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It currently has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Polish...
, by a group of contributors to the Spanish Wikipedia, who left because of fears of censorship and the possibility of the placement of advertising on Wikipedia.Wikinfo was launched in July 2003 as "Internet-Encyclopedia"; it was a fork of the English-language Wikipedia, meant to hold original research and multiple articles on subjects from different points of view, instead of Wikipedia's policy of a single neutral-point-of-view article. - WikiZnanie is a Russian-language wiki encyclopedia created in 2003; it took most of its content from the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic DictionaryBrockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic DictionaryThe Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary is, in its scope and style, the Russian counterpart to the Encyclopædia Britannica. It contains 121,240 articles, 7,800 images, and 235 maps...
of 1906.
2004–2006: an explosion in interest
The period from 2004 to 2006 saw an explosion in interest in both wikis generally and Wikipedia in particular, and both started to become household terms. Corporations, organizations and other communities began to make increasing use of wikis. Many of the wiki-based sites, technologies and events that dominate today were started during that period.2004 saw the launch of two major proprietary wiki applications: Confluence
Confluence (software)
Confluence is an enterprise wiki software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments, Confluence is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a hosted solution...
in March and JotSpot in October. Like Socialtext before them, the two launched with major corporate backing and venture capital, and geared themselves heavily toward corporate usage. JotSpot was bought by Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
in 2006 for an undisclosed amount (Google would later release the technology, in modified form, as Google Sites
Google Sites
Google Sites is a structured wiki- and web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps Productivity suite.- History :Google Sites started out as JotSpot, the name and sole product of a software company that offered enterprise social software. It was targeted mainly at...
in 2008).
In October 2004, the wiki hosting service Wikicities launched, co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation board member Angela Beesley. In March 2006, it changed its name to Wikia
Wikia
Wikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...
. Wikia remains the best-known and most popular wiki farm.
A large number of other notable wiki farms were released soon afterward, including Wikispaces
Wikispaces
Wikispaces is a hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched in March 2005, Wikispaces is owned by Tangient LLC and is among the largest wiki hosts, competing with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and Google Sites .Private wikis with advanced features for businesses, non-profits and...
(launched March 2005), PBwiki (launched June 2005, later renamed PBworks) and Wetpaint
Wetpaint
Wetpaint is a Seattle, Washington-based company, founded in 2005, that hosts both user-generated and professionally created content. Wetpaint began as a wiki farm, hosting wikis using their own proprietary software. In 2010, the main site was rebranded as Wetpaint Entertainment, a website focused...
(launched October 2005). Wikidot
Wikidot
Wikidot.com is a social networking service and wiki hosting service , developed in Toruń, Poland. Wikidot Inc., which owns and operates Wikidot.com, is incorporated in Delaware, USA, Division of Corporations, file no. 4326793...
was launched in August 2006.
2005 marked the beginning of large-scale wiki-related meetings and conferences. August 2005 saw the first-ever Wikimania
Wikimania
Wikimania is an annual international conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation...
, an annual conference organized around Wikimedia Foundation projects, in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. WikiSym
WikiSym
WikiSym is a short hand for International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, or the Wiki Symposium, a conference dedicated to wiki research and practice. Its proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library.-Overview:...
, a more academic annual symposium about wikis in general, was first held a few months later, in October 2005, in San Diego, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. RecentChangesCamp
RecentChangesCamp
RecentChangesCamp is an unconference focused on wikis, that was first held in 2006. It is named after the "recent changes" feature that is found in most wikis...
, an unconference
Unconference
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization...
dedicated to wikis, was first held in February 2006 in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
. Wikimania and WikiSym remain the two largest wiki-related gatherings.
Hybrid applications that combined wikis with other functionality began to emerge during this period. Trac
Trac
Trac is an open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. The program is inspired by CVSTrac, and was originally named svntrac due to its ability to interface with Subversion. It is developed and maintained by Edgewall Software....
, a project management
Project management
Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...
and bug tracking tool that includes wiki functionality, was first released in February 2004. wikiCalc
WikiCalc
wikiCalc is a web application, created by Dan Bricklin, that allows for the creation and editing of spreadsheets through a wiki-style user-editable interface...
, a wiki-based spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
application, was launched in November 2005 by spreadsheet pioneer Dan Bricklin. Redmine
Redmine
Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. It includes calendar and Gantt charts to aid visual representation of projects and their deadlines. It supports multiple projects...
, an application similar to Trac, was created in June 2006.
In 2005 a number of semantic wiki
Semantic Wiki
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks...
applications were launched, including the currently best-known one, Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki...
(which was first announced at Wikimania 2005).
Other notable wiki applications created during this time period were DokuWiki
DokuWiki
DokuWiki is a wiki application aimed at small companies’ documentation needs. DokuWiki is licensed under GPL 2 and written in the programming language PHP. It works on plain text files and thus needs no database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki.-History:DokuWiki was created by...
(released June 2004) and MindTouch DekiWiki (released June 2006). DekiWiki was later renamed to "Deki", then to MindTouch Core. Jive Software
Jive Software
Jive Software is a software company in the social business software industry based in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 2001, Jive maintains additional offices in Portland, OR, Boulder, CO, Frankfurt, Germany, Tel Aviv, Israel, and London, UK.-Products:...
released the proprietary application Clearspace in December 2006; it was later renamed "Jive SBS", and then Jive Engage.
In November 2006 Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which added wiki functionality (along with blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
functionality and other features) to the product.
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
Wikipedia experienced exponential growth in usage and readership during the period from 2004 to 2006, rising in AlexaAlexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
rankings from the top 1000 websites into the top 15. It was named one of the top 5 global brands of 2006 in the Brandchannel
Brandchannel
Brandchannel is a website about branding launched in 2001, with the goal of offering a global perspective on brands. Brandchannel is committed to providing readers with an accessible exploration and analysis of brands...
Readers' Choice Awards.
In 2004 the Wikimedia Foundation launched three new sites: Wikispecies
Wikispecies
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free content catalogue of all species and is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public...
, for cataloging species, in August 2004, Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation....
, to hold images and other media used by the Wikimedia projects, in September 2004, and Wikinews
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an...
, for publishing collaborative news articles, in December 2004. Wikiversity
Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project, which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than...
, intended for tutorials and other courseware, was later launched in August 2006.
In November 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler
John Seigenthaler
John Lawrence Seigenthaler is an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He is known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights....
wrote a much-publicized article in USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
about Wikipedia's article about him, which for over four months had contained a false statement about him, inserted as a joke, stating that he had been a suspect in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
and Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician, a Democratic senator from New York, and a noted civil rights activist. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Kennedy family, he was a younger brother of President John F...
. The USA Today article generated a subsequent controversy
Wikipedia biography controversy
The Wikipedia biography controversy, sometimes called the Seigenthaler incident, was a series of events that began in May 2005 with the anonymous posting of a hoax article in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist. The article falsely stated that...
that both caused Wikipedia to tighten its standards for creating articles, especially articles about living people, and highlighted the growing importance of Wikipedia as a source of information.
During this period, Wikipedia also began to enter the popular culture. A prominent example was the Weird Al Yankovic parody song "White & Nerdy
White & Nerdy
"White & Nerdy" is the second single from "Weird Al" Yankovic's album Straight Outta Lynwood, which was released on September 26, 2006. It parodies the song "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire and Krayzie Bone...
", which peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100
Billboard Hot 100
The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...
in late 2006, and contained the lyric "I edit Wikipedia". In December 2006, Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine chose "You
You (Time Person of the Year)
"You" were chosen in 2006, as Time magazine's Person of the Year. It recognized you and the millions of people who anonymously contribute user-generated content to Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, the GNU/Linux operating system and the multitudes of other websites featuring user...
" as their Person of the Year, referring to the rise of Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
and web technologies that allow for user-contributed content, and cited Wikipedia as one of the key websites that allow for "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before."
Other wiki websites, 2004–2006
In July 2004, OpenStreetMapOpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable GPS devices.The...
, a website to create an open-source street map of the world using wiki functionality, was launched.
Most of the major satirical
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
wikis launched at around this time. Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopædia Dramatica was a satirical open wiki that used MediaWiki software. Launched on December 10, 2004, it lampooned both encyclopedic topics and current events, especially those related or relevant to contemporary internet culture. It was frequently utilized by a socially fluid and dynamic...
, which mocked internet culture, was founded in December 2004 (it was shut down in April 2011). Stupidedia
Stupidedia
Stupidedia is a German-language wiki featuring satirically themed and humorous articles. In 2010 it joined the Uncyclopedia family, becoming one of the site's German language wikis. Stupidedia is the largest German language wiki of this kind, with over 19,200 articles .- External links :* * *...
, a German-language
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
wiki intended as a direct parody of Wikipedia, was also founded in December 2004, a week later. Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia is a satirical website that parodies Wikipedia. Founded in 2005 as an originally English-language wiki, the project currently spans over 75 languages...
, an English-language wiki also intended to parody Wikipedia, was founded the next month, in January 2005; it was later extended to dozens of other languages, and merged in other wikis, including Stupidedia. La Frikipedia
La Frikipedia
La Frikipedia is a Spanish online wiki. It is a parody of Wikipedia. La Frikipedia translated to the english like The Geekpedia or The Freakypedia, since the title actually came from the anglicism Freak. Its also called "the extremely serious encyclopedia" or the "useless encyclopedia" is a parody...
, a Spanish-language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
parody of Wikipedia, was founded in October 2005.
wikiHow
WikiHow
wikiHow is a web-based and wiki-based community, consisting of an extensive database of how-to guides. wikiHow's mission is to build the world's largest and highest quality how-to manual. The site started as an extension of the already existing eHow website, and has evolved to host over 127,000...
, a popular how-to website, launched in April 2006.
Two major Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
wiki encyclopedias began in 2006: Baidu Baike
Baidu Baike
Baidu Encyclopedia is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based encyclopedia provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Like Baidu itself, the encyclopedia is heavily self-censored in line with government regulations....
in April and Hudong in November. Both currently hold millions of articles, and exceed the popularity of the Chinese Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia is the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started in October 2002, Chinese Wikipedia had over 270,000 articles as of September 2009 and 383,391 articles as of November 7, 2011...
within China. Both are for-profit wikis, that, unlike Wikipedia, hold the copyright to their own content.
2007–present: wikis enter the mainstream
A milestone in public acceptance of wikis was reached in March 2007 when the word "wiki" entered the Oxford English DictionaryOxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
.
In 2007, Wikipedia entered the top 10 most popular websites in the world. Wikipedia began to be heavily referenced in television and other media during 2007; see Wikipedia in culture
Wikipedia in culture
References to Wikipedia in culture have increased as more people learn about and use the online encyclopedia project. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalising or modifying articles. Still others feature characters using the references as a source, or positively comparing a...
.
In January 2007, DBpedia
DBpedia
DBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources,...
was launched: a project to publish structured data from Wikipedia in machine-readable, queriable form. By 2008, it became a major component of the Linked Data
Linked Data
In computing, linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a...
initiative.
Also in January 2007, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
released Amapedia
Amapedia
Amapedia was a wiki run by the retailer Amazon.com, that existed from January 2007 to June 2010, where users could edit articles about Amazon's products. Anyone with an account on Amazon.com account could edit the contents of Amapedia.- Beginnings :...
, a product-review wiki on its own website (Amapedia was later shut down in June 2010).
In March 2007, Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
, co-founder of Wikipedia, launched Citizendium
Citizendium
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001....
, an "expert-guided" encyclopedia wiki requiring participants to use their real names.
In August 2008, then-U.S. presidential candidate John McCain
John McCain
John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
was accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in a speech about Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
. In June 2009, journalist Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson may refer to:* Chris Anderson , founder of Future Publishing and curator of the TED Conference* Chris Anderson , author, journalist, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, popularized "The Long Tail"* Chris Anderson , football player, educator, former Vice-Chairman of Aberdeen F.C.*...
admitted to plagiarizing a series of Wikipedia articles in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Free: The Future of a Radical Price is a 2009 book written by Chris Anderson, Editor in chief of Wired magazine. He is also the author of The Long Tail, published in 2006. Free follows a thread from the previous work...
; he called it a "screwup," based on lack of clarity on how to cite a specific version of a Wikipedia article.
In October 2008, many of the developers of TWiki left the project to work on a fork of the code, which they named Foswiki, after creator Peter Thoeny took control of the TWiki code and trademark via his company, TWiki.net.
In May 2009, Google announced its Google Wave
Google Wave
Apache Wave is a software framework for real-time collaborative editing online. Google Inc. originally developed it as Google Wave.It was announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009....
platform (and its associated Federation protocol
Google Wave Federation Protocol
The Google Wave Federation Protocol, renamed as Wave Federation Protocol, is an open protocol, extension of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol that is used in Apache Wave...
), which would combine the functionality of wikis with e-mail, instant messaging and social networking in order to provide a collaborative, real-time, server-hosted communication platform. Google Wave was released to the general public in May 2010, but development on it was ended several months later, in August 2010. In December 2010, Google transferred control of the software's development to the Apache Foundation, and it was renamed "Apache Wave".
In 2010, the site WikiLeaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
(which had been founded in 2006) gained a great deal of both fame and notoriety as a result of a set of leaked documents the site published of classified materials from the United States government, notably footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike
July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike
The July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes were a series of air-to-ground attacks conducted by a team of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, in the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad, during the insurgency that followed the Iraq War.In the first strike "Crazyhorse 1/8"...
, the Afghan War documents leak and the United States diplomatic cables leak
United States diplomatic cables leak
The United States diplomatic cables leak, widely known as Cablegate, began in February 2010 when WikiLeaks—a non-profit organization that publishes submissions from anonymous whistleblowers—began releasing classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by 274 of its consulates,...
. The site runs on the MediaWiki application, and began as a wiki editable by anyone, but in 2010 had its permissions changed so that only its administrators could edit pages.
In December 2010, wiki functionality was added to the SAP NetWeaver Portal application.
See also
- Comparison of wiki softwareComparison of wiki softwareThe following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software packages.-General information:-Target audience:-Features 1:-Features 2:-Installation:-See also:* List of wiki software* List of wikis* Wiki farm...
- History of WikipediaHistory of WikipediaThe earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of an open source web-based online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman around 1999. Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, using the concept...
- List of wiki software
- List of wikis
- meta:List of largest wikis