1995: The collaborative internet takes a giant leap forward with WikiWikiWeb, the first site that actually invites people to hack it.
User-generated content and open source reporting are now standards of digital civilization. But for the internet’s first dozen years or so, even the eggheads who had invented the medium as a way of collaborating reliably over distances hadn’t thought of creating databases anyone could contribute to and edit other people’s work.
The state of the art in 1995 was the listserv — still very serviceable groupware, but limited by chronological indexing where, especially in a long discussion, the context could get completely buried.
With a wiki, you can jump in at the exact context — insert a sentence here — so the next reader doesn’t have to assemble random bits into a cohesive whole. With a wiki, contributors alter a “primary” document, like so many chefs perfecting the broth.
It all seems so obvious now, with cloud-based documents that multiple people can edit simultaneously.
But the wiki’s beginnings were humble: Like many things internet-related, the first was a practical application by one person trying to solve his own work-related problem. In this case, that person was Ward Cunningham, and the problem was how to better collaborate with a bunch of other programmers.
On this day in 1995, Cunningham installed the WikiWikiWeb on a $300 computer someone gave him and connected it to the mostly barren landscape that was then the internet, using a 14.4-baud dial-up modem.
“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,” he wrote to his collaborators at the time.
Cunningham also coined the word “wiki,” which has nothing to do with computers. As he explained to the American Heritage Dictionary:
Wiki wiki is the first Hawai’ian term I learned on my first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals. I said what? He explained that wiki wiki meant quick. I was to find the quick bus. I did pick up a book about the language before my return home. I learned many things from this but wiki wiki is the word that sticks the most.
Wikis are everywhere now, empowering a collective as big as the planet to improve any idea, make any suggestion, find the flaw in any plan. Wired.com hosts its own How-To Wiki — where you can learn how to run an ultramarathon or make your gadgets tweet.
The sixth-most trafficked site in the world is Wikipedia, which has more than 3.25 million articles in English and millions more in scores of other languages — all written, edited and maintained by nobody in particular.
In a trusted community like that WikiWikiWeb served, it’s not a great leap of faith to allow colleagues to update and edit web pages the group depends on.
What nobody could have predicted was that, in general, opening up the books and shelves of a reference library to anyone on the internet would not be an unmitigated disaster. While Wikipedia has been widely criticized as being fundamentally unreliable since at any given moment an entry could be vandalized — many schools and media outlets ban it as a primary source — its impact and utility is difficult to dismiss.
Many more people consume wikis than feed them, which may partly explain why enough damage isn’t done to these knowledge bases to make them unusable. And, in fact, Wikipedia’s core community does exert controls on contributors, uses software to aid in flagging vandalism, and acts very quickly to remove defacement of an entry.
But the notion of letting some stranger into your office to write — or erase — something on your whiteboard is an “only on the internet” phenomenon.
While the rules to live by are obvious, Cunningham himself has a few, which he still maintains on his WikiWikiWeb pages. They include:
- Write only factual information.
- Give concrete advice, rather than abstract.
- Respect the freedom you have been given.
- Be concise and stay on topic for the page.
- Use language you’d be comfortable reading out loud — “use” versus “utilize” — and keep it simple. Simple language often communicates better.
- Check for spelling and grammar errors — errors detract from the content.<
- Edit only when you think a page is lacking -- don't just sign your name at the bottom of every page.
- Delete only if doing so adds value.<
- Don't say things that are likely to make others mad. Practice civility and understatement.
- Above all, be good, and play nice!
Funny how these principles apply to so many things.
Source: Various
Image: WikiWikiWeb screenshot, circa 1994.
See Also:
- Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here
- Hey, Kid: Support Your Local Wiki
- Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
- Wiki Targets How-To Buffs
- Veni, Vidi, Wiki
- March 25, 1916: Ishi Dies, a World Ends
- March 25, 1954: RCA TVs Get the Color for Money
- March 22, 1995: Longest Human Space Adventure Ends
- Aug. 24, 1995: Say Hello to Windows 95
- Oct. 23, 1995: First Computer-Network Wiretap