WikiWikiWeb

WikiWikiWeb is the first and wiki forum ever! The wiki engine has been developed in the  programming language since 1994 by WardCunningham, and is based on a HyperCard stack that Cunningham designed for  with his former colleagues at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon.

The wiki forum was inaugurated in the Internet domain of Cunningham's  consultancy Cunningham & Cunningham, Incorporated, also in Portland, on March 25, 1995, as an automated add-on to its Portland Pattern Repository, a directory for publication of programming patterns which programmers sent by E-mail.

Both the wiki engine and the wiki forum are called WikiWikiWeb. Abbreviated variants of the name WikiWikiWeb are WikiWiki and Wiki. Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb after 'Wiki Wiki', a line of Chance RT-52 shuttle buses running between terminals at Honolulu International Airport. The name of the shuttle line is derived from the Hawaiian-language expression "wiki wiki", which is a word reduplication of "wiki", a word that means "fast". The reduplication wiki wiki is used to emphasize wiki, so wiki wiki could be translated as "faster than fast".

The tag line of WikiWikiWeb is "People, Programming and Patterns". The original purpose of WikiWikiWeb was to document  patterns, especially for members of Ralph Johnson's patterns mailing list, and for people who attended the Patterns Languages of Programs Conference (PLoP) and the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA).

However, around 1996 to 1998 approximately, discussion of extreme programming (XP) became more popular, and the first members of WikiWikiWeb, who preferred to discuss patterns, started emigrating. Some of them later complained about missing Wiki before XP.

Many former regular users of WikiWikiWeb have complained that the discussion on WikiWikiWeb has deteriorated since about 1999 or 2000, and some of them have described that deterioration as the heat death of Wiki.

WikiWikiWeb was , and is part of the  and . It has also been informally called Wards Wiki, as a homage to its creator.


 * External links
 * Ward's Personal Pages (these pages are not inside the wiki)


 * Additional tags
 * 
 * <Projects ></Projects>
 * <Patterns ></Patterns>
 * <GreatFeature ></GreatFeature>