IDEA No 67
THE WIKI
Documents that can be edited simultaneously by multiple people are now commonplace. Before Ward Cunningham invented the wiki in 1995, this was not so easy.
Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki.
In the early ’90s, the state-of-the-art collaboration tool was the LISTSERV. When an email is sent to a LISTSERV mailing list, it is automatically broadcast to everyone on the list. Ward Cunningham noticed that older messages were lost, buried under the more recent posts. He proposed that messages were collated on webpages, which would be collectively edited. As he explained, ‘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.’ On 25 March 1995, Cunningham launched WikiWikiWeb, named after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport. Originally, he was going to call it QuickWeb, but he changed his mind when he learned wiki was the Hawaiian word for ‘hurry’. The name is apt. From WikiWikiWeb: ‘All Wiki content is work in progress. Most of all, this is a forum where people share ideas! It changes as people come and go.’
Cunningham gave away the source code and wikis became common in the programming community. However, it was not until the launch of Wikipedia in 2001 that the wiki became mainstream. Now the sixth most popular website in the world, Wikipedia has more than 3 million articles, all written, edited and maintained by the crowd.
There are now wikis for subjects ranging from Star Wars (Wookieepedia) to classified government information (WikiLeaks). Despite criticism of the reliability of the information, they function very well. In December 2005, the journal Nature compared the accuracy of articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Across 42 articles, four serious errors were found in Wikipedia and four in Encyclopaedia Britannica, although Wikipedia’s articles were often ‘poorly structured’.
Wikis perhaps owe their success to the guiding principles put forward by Ward Cunningham back in 1995. He encouraged people to write only factual information, to avoid abstract advice and to be concise. His most important advice was perhaps contained in the way he signed off – ‘Above all, be good and play nice!’■
‘All Wiki content is work in progress.’
On 25 March 1995, Ward Cunningham launched WikiWikiWeb, named after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport.