A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] <WICK-ee> or [ˈwiː.kiː] <WEE-kee>[1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit
and change some available content, sometimes without the need for
registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an
effective tool for collaborative authoring.
The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine)
that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain
specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original
wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and the online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
The first such software to be called a wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was named by Ward Cunningham.
Cunningham remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee
telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus
line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to
Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for
'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web."
"Wiki Wiki"
is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for "what I know is", which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange function.
According to Cunningham, the idea of wiki can be traced back to a HyperCard
stack he wrote in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, wikis were
increasingly recognized as a promising way to develop private and
public knowledge bases, and this potential inspired the founders of the Nupedia encyclopedia project, which later became Wikipedia.
In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in the
enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project
communication, intranets and documentation, initially for technical
users. In December 2002, Socialtext
launched the first commercial open source wiki solution.
Open source
wiki software was widely available, downloaded and installed throughout
these years. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative
software and as a replacement for static intranets. There is arguably greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public internet. |