Wiki

Ward Cunningham had a problem. As a software consultant at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon, he was collecting design patterns—reusable solutions to common programming problems—and needed a way to share and refine them collaboratively. Email threads were unwieldy. Static web pages required too much technical overhead to update. He wanted something simpler: a website where anyone could edit any page, directly in the browser, with changes taking effect immediately.

In March 1995, Cunningham launched WikiWikiWeb (wiki meaning 'quick' in Hawaiian) to host the Portland Pattern Repository. The technology was deliberately minimal: pages were plain text with simple formatting rules, links were created by CamelCase words, and the entire edit history was preserved. There were no logins, no permissions, no approval workflows. The radical assumption: if you made it easy for people to fix problems, more good edits would happen than bad ones. Vandalism could be reverted faster than it could be created.

The adjacent possible was perfectly configured. The World Wide Web had demonstrated hypertext's power. CGI scripting enabled dynamic page generation. But crucially, Cunningham's insight was social, not technical: web pages had inherited print's author-controlled model, but hypertext could enable something new—collaborative writing where the boundary between reader and author dissolved. Apple's HyperCard had hinted at this, but HyperCard stacks couldn't be shared over networks.

WikiWikiWeb attracted programmers who contributed patterns, debated methodologies, and organically developed the culture of wiki editing: assume good faith, be bold, fix rather than complain. The software was cloned and adapted—UseModWiki, TWiki, MoinMoin—each variation proving that the wiki concept transcended any particular implementation.

The cascade culminated in Wikipedia. When Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched the free encyclopedia project in January 2001, they initially used traditional editorial processes. Within days, they installed wiki software, and contributions exploded. By 2025, Wikipedia contained over 60 million articles in 300+ languages, becoming humanity's largest collaborative writing project and one of the most-visited websites on Earth. The wiki—a tool designed for sharing programming patterns—had demonstrated that crowds of strangers, given the right tools and norms, could create knowledge at scales no traditional organization could match.