History of wikis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There were several historical antecedents to the wikis, which is the name used to refer to a website with pages that can be edited by any visitor. One of the earliest precursors was Vannevar Bush's vision of a microfilm hypertext system which he called the "memex" (1945). Other precursors were an early collaborative hypertext database called the ZOG (1972), and the Apple Computer hypertext system called HyperCard (1987).

However, the creation of the first wiki website only became possible with the development of the hypertext protocol of the WorldWideWeb (1991) and graphical web browsers such as the Netscape Navigator (1994). In order to facilitate communication between software developers, and also to experiment with the new hypertext capabilities, Ward Cunningham created the first wiki, which he called WikiWikiWeb (using the Hawaiian word "wiki" in place of "quick"). Cunningham went public with the first wiki in early 1995, inviting a selected group of programmers to participate in the experiment.

Ward Cunningham's first wiki met with immediate success, and quickly spawned "wiki clones," alternative versions of the wiki software. The use of wiki websites was rapidly adopted by communities of free software developers, but at first remained confined to these specialised groups. In the meantime the WikiWikiWeb evolved rapidly as features were added to the software and as the growing body of users developed a unique "wiki culture." By 2000 the number of contributors to Ward Cunningham's website had grown so large that conflicts developed between those who wanted to restrict the discussion to computer programming and those who wanted to discuss issues relating to the functioning of the wiki itself. The conflict was resolved by the creation the "SisterSites" MeatballWiki and WhyClublet as separate forums for discussion.

Wikis remained largely unknown outside of circles of software developers until around 2001, when the success of the free content encyclopedia Wikipedia introduced wikis to the general public. After 2001 the number of wiki websites and the varieties of wiki engines (software implementations) increased exponentially. There now exist thousands of wiki websites and hundreds of wiki engines.

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[edit] Historical antecedents of the wiki concept

A distant precursor of the wiki concept was Vannevar Bush's vision of the "memex," a microfilm reader which would create automated links between documents. In his 1945 article How we may think, Vannevar Bush described how he imaged the future experience of the user: "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 clearly foresees the hypertext mechanism, which will be taken advantage of by all wikis. However, hypertext is a general feature of all World Wide Web applications, rather than a feature that is specific to wikis. [1]

Another precursor of the wiki concept was the ZOG 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, ...). [2]

The ZOG system was the model for Janet Walker's Document Examiner, created in 1985 for the operation manuals of Symbolics computers. Document Examiner was in turn the model for the Note Cards system, released by Xerox in 1985. Note Cards is a hypertext system that features scrolling windows for each note card, combined with a separate browser and navigator window. Note Cards was the inspiration for Bill Atkinson's WildCard, which was later called HyperCard. [2] Ward Cunningham traces the wiki idea back to a HyperCard stack that he wrote in the late 1980's. [3]

[edit] The influence of HyperCard on wiki inventor Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham was introduced to HyperCard (then called WildCard) by Kent Beck, who obtained access to it after joining Apple Computer. 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 recognise 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. The fields in HyperCard were WYSIWYG editors, but linking was a pain that involved moving between both cards. Cunningham abandoned regular stack links and used search-on-demand instead. Normally one would type links into the Links field. When using the card, each link had a button that would take you to the card if it existed, or beep otherwise. If you held the button down, it would relent and go make the card for you. (One can recognise here the traditional wiki feature by which a new page is opened for editing whenever one clicks on any new word formed in camel-case. In Wikipedia the equivalent feature is called "red links".) [4]

[edit] The World Wide Web sets the stage for the first wiki

Main article: History of the World Wide Web

Ward Cunningham's first wiki was made possible by the hypertext capabilities of the World Wide Web. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee of CERN built the first hypertext browser, which he called WorldWideWeb (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 web browser in 1993, which gained wide popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia and the authors’ rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features. Its creators formed Mosaic Communications Corporation, which changed its name to Netscape in April 1994, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator. That same month CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code for free. The stage was set for the appearance of Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb.

[edit] The creation of WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki

Ward Cunningham 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. [3]

The WikiWikiWeb was intended as a collaborative database, dedicated to People, Projects and Patterns, [3] in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. Cunningham wrote the software to run it using the Perl programming language. [5] He named it using the alliterative Hawaiian word wiki-wiki, which means "quick-quick," to avoid calling it "quick-web". [3]

Cunningham installed a prototype of the software on his company Cunningham & Cunningham's website c2.com. In a surviving email received by Ward Cunningham on 6 November 1994, the server administrator Randy Bush wrote: "You will find the web stuff started and running, but rather content-free. It is in the directory /usr/local/etc/httpd/htdocs. You can send folk to … http://c2.com." Cunningham replied: "Actually, a higher priority for me is completing a first cut at my repository." [6]

A few months later, when the Repository was functioning, Cunningham sent to a colleague the following email, dated March 16, 1995:

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 [6]

Cunningham dates the official start of WikiWikiWeb as March 25, 1995. [3] On May 1, 1995 he sent to a number of programmers an InvitationToThePatternsList , which caused an increase in participation. [3] This note was posted to the “Patterns” listserv, a group of software developers gathered under the name "Hillside Group" to develop Erich Gamma's use of object-oriented patterns (inspired by Christopher Alexander's use of patterns in architecture). 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." [7]

The site was immediately popular within the pattern community, due to both the newness of the World Wide Web and the good slate of invited authors. [3]

[edit] Initial WikiWiki software clones

Clones of the WikiWikiWeb software were soon developed. PatrickMueller wrote probably the first WikiWikiClone, using the RexxLanguage. [3] Ward Cunningham wrote a version of wiki that could host its own source code, called Wiki Base, and announced WikiWikiGoesPublic. The announcement said: "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. [3]. 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. [3]

One of the early clones of Wiki Base was CvWiki, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel. CvWiki was the first Wiki Base clone to have functioning transclusion and backlinks. It was fully integrated with Concurrent Version System (CVS) software, thereby providing unlimited undo and no edit collisions. [8]

[edit] Initial 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 (FOSS) community, where they were ideal for collaboratively discussing and documenting software, particularly given the loose structure of the projects. However, being used only by specialists, these early software-focused wikis failed to attract widespread public attention. [9]

[edit] Growth and innovations in WikiWikiWeb from 1995 to 2000

The WikiWikiWeb grew steadily from 1995 to 1998, and then snowballed between 1998 and 2000. Ward Cunningham's statistics about disk-usage show the following progression in the number of 1k blocks consumed by WikiWikiWeb pages: [3]

  • Nov 29 1994: -
  • Dec 15 1995: 2426
  • Dec 1 1996: 5134
  • Dec 31 1997: 10600
  • Mar 25 1998: 14554
  • Dec 2 2000: 62919

Some of the major innovations within WikiWikiWeb from 1995 to 2000, many of which were proposed by the community of users, were: [3]

  • 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<Month>"
  • 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" is 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." [10]

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 becomes incomprehensible the result is called ThreadMess. [11] (On Wikipedia 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 the Talk page.)

The Categories were proposed by Stan Silver on August 27, 1996. [12] 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." [13]

Ward Cunningham had originally created Wiki with the capability to click on the title of a page to see which pages pointed to it. Stan Silver used this reverse index technology to provide lists of the categories: [12] "Go to the CategoryCategory page and press its title to see all categories." [13]

Initially Stan Silver had proposed both categories and topics: categories denoted what the page was about (a book, a person, a pattern), while topics denoted the contents of the page (Java, extreme programming, Smalltalk). However, people ignored this separation, and so the topics were collapsed into the categories. [12]

The ChangeSummary 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. (The ChangeSummary is the ancestor of the Wikipedia feature whereby an editor can enter a line of descriptive text when saving changes to a page.) [3]

[edit] Tensions within WikiWikiWeb and the creation of SisterSites

Between early 1998 and the end of 2000 participation in WikiWikiWeb 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 WikiWikiWeb and started posting comments about ExtremeProgramming 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 was referred to as WardsWiki instead of the PortlandPatternRepository. [3]

Around the summer of 1999 a Wiki user known as SamGentile 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. Sam 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, a term which would come to denote a general type of action, which in this particular case had taken the form of WikiSuicide. It was the first case of massive deliberate deletions of text on the WikiWikiWeb. It would be followed by another. [14]

On the morning of Friday 7th April 2000 four Europeans, Richard Drake, Keith Braithwaite, Stephan Houben and Manfred Schaefer, starting independently, tried to reduce the amount of text on Wiki by a large number of deletions. [15] They mainly attacked the "soft target" of WikiOnWiki material, which is defined as "Wiki pages devoted to Wiki, its nature, form and postulated future development." [16] They considered this material to be dead weight, and would have preferred to see it all replaced by concise guidance to newcomers. The primary focus of WikiWikiWeb was supposed to be on computer programming design patterns, and users who strayed too far from the focus were considered by some to be WikiSquatting, which meant developing their own separate community within the WikiWikiWeb.

The group that made the deletions became known as the WikiReductionists. The term has come to represent a general approach to Wiki editing, those advocating a contrary approach being called WikiConstructionists. [15] (On Wikipedia the equivalent terms are inclusionist and exclusionist, or deletionist.) [17][18]

Contributors who were outraged by the deletions of the WikiReductions began copying all of the deleted text back in again. A vote was taken of where the Wiki users stood on this issue. It was proposed that any "reductions" should be pre-announced, with an opportunity for response before action is taken. [15] (This was a distant precursor of the Wikipedia deletion policy, which requires announcement, discussion and voting before any controversial deletion of an article.)

Critics of the WikiReductionists accused them of escalating a flame war to the level of a ForestFire. [19] The longer-term result of the attack was the formation of WikiWikiWeb Sister Sites. In an amicable resolution to the conflict, Sunir Shah created MeatballWiki and invited all those who were interested in WikiOnWiki discussions to post their comments there. A few months later, Richard Drake (one of the four original WikiReductionists) 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." The implementation of SisterSites at the level of changes to the Wiki script dates from 2001. [3]

In 2001 WikiWikiWeb founder Ward Cunningham and user Bo Leuf published a book, The Wiki Way, which distilled the lessons learned during the collective experience of the first wiki. [20]

[edit] The creation of Wikipedia

Main article: History 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, 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 the Slashdot website 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, and the rate of growth has generally increased steadily since the inception of the project. As of 2007, Wikipedia includes several million freely-usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. It is one of the most popular web sites and extensively used reference sites worldwide.

[edit] Development of wiki software to the end of 2002

Clones of the WikiWikiWeb software began to be developed as soon as Ward Cunningham 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 clone to have functioning transclusion, backlinks and WayBackMode.

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). [21]

TWiki was created in Perl language by Peter Thoeny in 1998, based on JosWiki. Twiki was aimed at large corporate Intranets. It uses flat-files, which means that the data is stored in plain text files instead of in a database. (Flat-files allow a more rapid system than does the more complicated storage of pages in a database, but a database system can have more capabilities than a flat-file system.) [22] [23]

PikiPiki was created by Martin Pool in 1999 as a rewrite of WikiWikiWeb in Python Language. It was made to be a small program, using flat files and doing away with versioning (Martin Pool felt that a wiki is not meant to be a document-management system). [24] [25]

PhpWiki, created by Steve Wainstead in 1999 was the first wiki software written in PHP language. The initial version was a feature-for-feature reimplementation of the original WikiWikiWeb at c2.com. [26] Subsequent versions adopted many features from UseModWiki. [23]

Swiki (Squeak Wiki) was written in Squeak language by Mark Guzdial and Jochen Rick in 1999. It is used at the Georgia Institute of Technology for collaborative group web pages. One installation of a swiki allows a large number of virtual wikis to be created through the administrative interface using any web browser. A Swiki has its own web server and consists of the Virtual Machine (VM) file, an image file, and a set of files and folders with templates and the virtual wikis. [22] [27]

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 developed by Simon Michael, Joyful Systems and contributors from around the world. It uses a ZODB Object Database. [28]

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 Peter Merel's CvWiki. [29]

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, which makes it often the wiki of choice for many open source projects and corporate wikis. 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 output formatters can be written, and all parsers using the interface will be automatically supported. [30] [22]

JSPWiki, created by Janne Jalkanen in 2001, is flat-file wiki software built around JavaServer Pages (JSP). JSPWiki adapted and extended the Php wiki markup. It is primarily used for company and university intranets as a project wiki or a knowledge management application. Sun Microsystems has integrated JSPWiki into their portal server software. Due to its easy installation, many people also use it as a Personal Information Manager (PIM). [31]

The MediaWiki program 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 to one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication became a major concern for the developers. Internationalization has also received significant attention by MediaWiki developers (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 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. While new namespaces can be added, the number of namespaces in a wiki typically remains low. [32]

PmWiki was created in Php language by Patrick Michaud in 2002. It is a flat-file wiki engine that was designed to be easy to install and customize as an engine for creating professional web sites with one or many content authors. 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. [33]

TikiWiki was created in Php language by Luis Argerich in 2002. It is designed as a Content Management System (CMS) and Groupware application enabling websites on the Internet and on intranets. TikiWiki is modular with components that can be individually enabled and customized by the TikiWiki administrator, and extending customization to the user with selectable skins and themes. TikiWiki is an international project, providing translations of the interface in several languages. Though developed primarily in Php, TikiWiki has some JavaScript code. It will run on any server and supports several possible databases. Its components incorporate several other open source projects and applications [34]

coWiki was developed by Daniel T. Gorski in 2002. It was one of the largest projects being developed under Php5 when that language 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. [35]

EditMe was developed by the EditMe company in 2002. It was built on Java (hosted) elements, with a MySQL database. Unlike most other early wikis, EditMe was proprietary. [22]

[edit] Development of wiki software after 2002

After 2002 the number of wiki engines continued to grow exponentially, as new commercial products were introduced, and as new open-source projects continually forked off of existing ones. For example, the small, easy-to-modify open source wiki engine named WakkaWiki, while having itself been discontinued 2004, has spawned at least five forks: CitiWiki, UniWakka, WackoWiki, WikiNi and WikkaWiki. [36]

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 HTML, 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. [37]

[edit] Development of wiki websites to the end of 2003

After the creation of the first wiki website WikiWikiWeb in 1995, the usage of wikis was rapidly adopted by free software development groups. However, for several years participation in wikis was restricted to these specialised programming communities.

While many early wiki websites were devoted to the development of open source software, one early wiki was created by the FoxPro company, sellers of proprietary software. FoxPro Wiki was founded in 1999 by Steven Black and evolved into a popular site with many pages. [38]

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. All of the articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence. [39]

A wiki forum was created in 1999 for discussion of newly-created PhpWiki software. This became one of larger software-related wikis. In 2000 Arno Hollosi contributed heavily to development of PhpWiki because he was interested in running a wiki for the game Go (he created Sensei's wiki in 2002, as described below). [40]

Clifford Adams began running a wiki for his Usenet Moderation (Usemod) Project in 1999 using AtisWiki. Late in 1999 he began running test versions of his own UseModWiki engine, and in 2000 he created the UseModWiki as forum to discuss the UseModWiki software. In April 2000 Adams invited Sunir Shah to install the MeatballWiki on the usemod.com website, using the same UseModWiki software. MeatballWiki was a friendly fork from the WikiWikiWeb, dedicated to online communities, Around the same time, the WhyClublet (or "Why?") wiki was forked from WikiWikiWeb to host discussion of Christian issues.

MeatballWiki rapidly became a popular wiki for discussions of online communities and WikiOnWiki topics. [41] MeatballWiki provided key contributions to a series of innovations in the linking together of wikis which included: [42] [43]

  • InterWikiMap on WikiWikiWeb provided a simple InterWiki linking system (2000) [44]
  • MetaWiki, the idea of a wiki that helps people find other wikis [45]
  • TourBus project (summer 2002)
  • OneBigWiki (2002), the idea of having one wiki distributed across several servers [46]
  • SwitchWiki (2003): the idea of having one site where one can switch between wikis [47]
  • WikiIndex, an actual wiki listing other wikis, thereby implementing the MetaWiki and SwitchWiki ideas [48]
  • WikiNode, another way to implement InterWiki

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. It is one of the largest and most active wikis on the internet outside of the Wikipedia project. [49]

Wikipedia's English edition was launched on January 15, 2001 (see separate section above).

Susning.nu is a Swedish language wiki, created in October 2001 by Lars Aronsson. It has become one of the largest wikis. Aronsson's aim for Susning is "to make it into what the users want it to be." Susning is an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a discussion forum about any concept of interest to its users. It is in direct competition with the Swedish Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, Susning places advertisements on practically all its articles. It has no license agreement, and contributions remain copyrighted by their submitters (the right to modify is said to be implicit in the site's function). Third parties, such as Wikipedia contributors, cannot legally use Susning materials contributed by others without permission. [50]

The Enciclopedia Libre was founded by a group of contributors to the Spanish-language Wikipedia, led by Edgar Enyedy, who left Wikipedia on February 26, 2002 to start an independent project. Their stated reasons for the split were that they rejected censorship and were against a proposal to put advertising on the wiki. They seeded the new website with the freely licensed articles of the Spanish-language Wikipedia. [51]

SourceWatch (formerly Disinfopedia) is the wiki website of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). It was launched by Sheldon Rampton in March 2003. It aims to produce a directory of public relations firms and industry-funded organizations that influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. The content of Sourcewatch is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. [52]

Javapedia is a project openly inspired by Wikipedia. The project was launched in June 2003 during the JavaOne developer conference. It is part of the java.net wiki, which is promoted by Sun Microsystems as the central meeting place for the Java community. The Project aims at creating an online encyclopedia covering all aspects of the Java platform. [53]

Wikinfo (formerly Internet-Encyclopedia) is a fork of the English Wikipedia initiated by Fred Bauder in July 2003. Rather than adopting Wikipedia's neutral point of view editorial policy, Wikinfo's policy is to edit for either a sympathetic point of view or a critical point of view. Thus Wikinfo can host a set of articles about a particular topic, each presenting a particular point of view, and linked to the others at the top of the article. [54]

Wikitravel was started in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Wikitravel was inspired in part by Wikipedia, but is not a Wikimedia project. Since it uses the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, rather than the GNU Free Documentation License used by Wikipedia, it is easier for individuals and tourism agencies to make free reprints of individual pages. While Wikipedia and Wikitravel are both free content resources, content cannot be freely copied between them because of the incompatible licenses. [55]

WikiZnanie is a Russian language encyclopedia (znanie is Russian for knowledge) created in 2003 by Andrey Vovk. WikiZnanie differs from the Russian Wikipedia project by licensing under the FreeBSD Documentation License (instead of GFDL) and by displaying commercial ads on article pages. It also allows original research, which Wikipedia prohibits. [56]

Memory Alpha is a wiki devoted to the Star Trek fictional universe. It was launched by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in December 2003. It has become one of the largest wiki projects. [57]

Other wiki websites created in 2003 include: [25]

  • CommunityWiki
  • CraoWiki
  • EmacsWiki
  • FractalWiki
  • GründerWiki

[edit] Development of wiki websites after 2003

Since 2003 the number of wiki websites has grown at an exponential rate. In addition to an ever-increasing number of new wiki websites on the Internet, covering an enormous range of topics, there has been increasing use of corporate wikis on intranets behind firewalls.

Many wikis created after 2003, especially on pop cultural topics, are hosted by Wikia.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Vannevar Bush, "How we may think", 1945.
  2. ^ a b Wiki Wiki Origin
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Wiki History
  4. ^ Wiki Wiki Hypercard
  5. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
  6. ^ a b http://c2.com/wiki/mail-history.txt
  7. ^ Robert E. Cummings, What Was a Wiki, and Why Do I Care? A Short and Usable History of Wikis [1]
  8. ^ http://www.123exp-technology.com/t/03881190874
  9. ^ Andy Szybalski, Why it’s not a wiki world (yet), 14 March 2005
  10. ^ Thread Mode
  11. ^ Thread Mess
  12. ^ a b c History Of Categories
  13. ^ a b AboutCategoriesAndTopics
  14. ^ Wiki Mind Wipe Discussion
  15. ^ a b c Wiki Reductionists
  16. ^ Wiki On Wiki
  17. ^ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Transwiki:Constructionism_and_reductionism_%28wiki%29
  18. ^ Marked for Deletion, National Public Radio, http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/2007/01/20/marked_for_deletion.html
  19. ^ Meatball Wiki: ForestFire
  20. ^ Ward Cunningham and Bo Leuf, The Wiki Way, 2001
  21. ^ Jos Wiki
  22. ^ a b c d http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
  23. ^ a b Top Ten Wiki Engines
  24. ^ Piki Piki
  25. ^ a b Meatball Wiki: WikiHistory
  26. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpWiki
  27. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiki
  28. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwiki
  29. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UseModWiki
  30. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoinMoin
  31. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSPWiki
  32. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki
  33. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PmWiki
  34. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikiWiki
  35. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/coWiki
  36. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WakkaWiki
  37. ^ chongqed.org wiki: WikiHome
  38. ^ Wiki FAQ - Visual FoxPro Wiki
  39. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World66
  40. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpWiki
  41. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UseModWiki
  42. ^ ProgressionOfWikiOrganization - WikiNodes
  43. ^ Inter Wiki
  44. ^ Inter Wiki Map
  45. ^ Meatball Wiki: MetaWiki
  46. ^ Meatball Wiki: OneBigWiki
  47. ^ Switch Wiki
  48. ^ Switch Wiki
  49. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensei
  50. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning
  51. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre
  52. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcewatch
  53. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javapedia
  54. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinfo
  55. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitravel
  56. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiZnanie
  57. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Alpha

[edit] See also

[edit] External links