A wiki is a website whose pages can be created and edited collaboratively, directly in the browser, by the people who read them. The idea originated with Ward Cunningham, who built the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb, and put it online at his company’s site, c2.com, on March 25, 1995. Cunningham took the name from the Hawaiian phrase “wiki wiki,” meaning quick, after the shuttle buses at Honolulu airport; the word captured his goal of making it as fast as possible to write and link web pages.
Cunningham’s design followed a deliberately minimal philosophy, which he summarized as building the simplest online database that could possibly work. There were no separate authoring tools, no accounts, and no approval step: any visitor could click “edit,” change the text of a page, and save it for everyone to see. New pages were created simply by referring to them, and links were made by joining capitalized words together, the “CamelCase” convention that an early wiki recognized automatically as a page name. A lightweight plain-text markup, the ancestor of later wikitext and Markdown styles, kept formatting easy to type.
The first wiki had a specific purpose. Cunningham ran it as the Portland Pattern Repository, a place for programmers to collect and discuss software design patterns. The collaborative, ever-editable format suited that goal well: ideas could be added, refined, refactored, and cross-linked by many contributors over time, producing a living body of knowledge rather than a fixed set of documents. The site grew into one of the early internet’s richest collections of programming lore and discussion.
The wiki model rested on a striking bet about trust. Because anyone could edit anything, the system was open to vandalism and error, yet it worked because the same openness let any reader immediately fix what they found wrong, and because every page kept a history of its versions. This combination of radical openness with easy reversibility turned out to be far more robust than skeptics expected, and it became the defining characteristic of the form.
Cunningham’s invention seeded an entire genre of collaborative software. Wiki engines multiplied, and the concept reached its largest expression in Wikipedia, which runs on the MediaWiki engine and made the wiki one of the most consequential ideas in the history of the web. The original WikiWikiWeb remains online as a primary record of where the idea began.