The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "

WikiWikiWeb The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' ori ...

" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the

wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web applicatio ...

that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "

Wiki Wiki Shuttle The Wiki Wiki Shuttle () is a free shuttle bus service at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. Shuttles run between 6:00 am and 10:00 pm local time, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals. In the ...

" at

Honolulu International Airport Daniel K. Inouye International Airport , also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the main airport of Oahu, Hawaii.Hawaiian word for "quick". Wiki software has some conceptual origins in the

version control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

and hypertext systems used for documentation and software in the 1980s, and some actualized origins in the 1970s "Journal" feature of NLS. Its distant ancestors include

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...

's proposed "

memex Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of ...

" system in 1945, the collaborative hypertext database ZOG in 1972, the NoteCards system from

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

, the

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

hypertext system

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

. As was typical of these earlier systems, Cunningham's motive was technical: to facilitate communication between software developers. Many alternative wiki applications and websites appeared over the next five years. In the meantime, the first wiki, now known as "WardsWiki", evolved as features were added to the software and as the growing body of users developed a unique "wiki culture". By 2000, WardsWiki had developed a great deal of content outside its original stated purpose, which led to the spinoff of content into sister sites, most notably MeatballWiki. The website

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

, a free content encyclopedia, was launched in January 2001, and quickly became the most popular wiki, which it remains to this day. Its rise in popularity (it was in the top ten most popular sites in 2007) played a large part in introducing wikis to the general public. There now exist at least hundreds of thousands of wiki websites, and they have become increasingly prevalent in corporations and other organizations.

Hypertext editing pre-1994

A distant precursor of the wiki concept was

's vision of the "

," a

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...

reader which would create automated links between documents. In a 1945 essay in '' Atlantic Monthly'' titled " As We May Think," Bush described an imaginary future user interface: "Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions… The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined… Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn…" This vision, though it has been described as predicting the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

, resembles wikis more than the web in one important way: the system being described is self-contained, not a loose network. In 1972

Kristo Ivanov Kristo Ivanov (born 1937-10-20) is a Swedish-Brazilian information scientist and systems scientist of ethnic Bulgarian origin. He is professor emeritus at the Department of informatics of Umeå University in Sweden. Biography Ivanov was born in ...

published a PhD dissertation on ''Quality-control of information'', containing a theoretical basis for what corresponds to the wiki-idea, in terms of systemic social interaction. Information turns into knowledge as a net of contributions and negotiations converge about a core concept, or entity. The emphasis is on a dynamically documented "agreement in the context of maximum possible disagreement," akin to the discussions in ''talk pages'' and the results of ''view history'' of Wikipedia.

Pre-World-Wide-Web hypertext systems

An indirect precursor of the wiki concept was the ZOG multi-user database system, developed in 1972 by researchers at

Carnegie-Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. The ZOG interface consisted of text-only frames, each containing a title, a description, a line with standard ZOG commands, and a set of selections ( hypertext links) leading to other frames. Two members of the ZOG team, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn, spun off a company from CMU in 1981 and developed an improved version of ZOG called Knowledge Management System (KMS). KMS was a collaborative tool based on

direct manipulation In computer science, human–computer interaction, and interaction design, direct manipulation is an approach to interfaces which involves continuous representation of objects of interest together with rapid, reversible, and incremental action ...

, permitting users to modify the contents of frames, freely intermixing text, graphics and images, any of which could be linked to other frames. Because the database was distributed and accessible from any workstation on a network, changes became visible immediately to other users, enabling them to work concurrently on shared structures (documents, programs, ...). Three notable hypertext-based systems emerged in the 1980s, that may have been inspired by ZOG, KMS and/or one another: the NoteCards system, developed in 1984 and released by

in 1985; Janet Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner, created in 1985 for the operation manuals of Symbolics computers; and

Bill Atkinson Bill Atkinson (born March 17, 1951) is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Atkinson was the principal designer and developer of the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Apple ...

's WildCard application, on which he began work in 1985, and which was released in 1987 as

. Ward Cunningham has stated, that the wiki idea was influenced by his experience using HyperCard: he was shown the software by fellow programmer

Kent Beck Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 ...

, before its official release (it was still called "WildCard" at the time), and, in his words, was "blown away" by it. Cunningham used HyperCard to make a stack holding three kinds of information: ideas, people who hold ideas, and projects where people share ideas. (He would later use this same architecture for the Patterns, People and Projects listed on the front page of his original wiki, the WikiWikiWeb.) Cunningham made a single card that would serve for all uses. It had three fields: Name, Description and Links. Cunningham configured the system so that links could be created to cards that didn't exist yet; creating such a link would in turn create a new blank card.

The World Wide Web

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN built the first hypertext client, which he called World Wide Web (it was also a Web editor), and the first hypertext server (info.cern.ch). In 1991 he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinc ...

, marking the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories. In May 1992 appeared

ViolaWWW ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually ...

, a graphical browser providing features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. However, the turning point for the World Wide Web was the introduction of the

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

graphical browser in 1993, which gained wide popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia. In April 1994, CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code for free.

WikiWikiWeb and the birth of wikis (1994–2001)

WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki

Ward Cunningham started developing the

in 1994 as a supplement to the

Portland Pattern Repository The Portland Pattern Repository (PPR) is a repository for computer programming software design patterns. It was accompanied by a companion website, WikiWikiWeb, which was the world's first wiki. The repository has an emphasis on Extreme Programmin ...

, a website containing documentation about

software design pattern In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine co ...

s, a particular approach to

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

. The WikiWikiWeb was intended as a collaborative database, in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier; it was dedicated to "People, Projects and Patterns." Cunningham wrote the software to run it using the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

programming language. He considered calling the software "quick-web," but instead named it using the Hawaiian word "wiki-wiki," which means "quick-quick" or "very quick," based on his memory of the

Honolulu International Airport Daniel K. Inouye International Airport , also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the main airport of Oahu, Hawaii.Cunningham & Cunningham's website c2.com. When the site was functioning, Cunningham sent the following email to a colleague: Cunningham dates the official start of WikiWikiWeb as March 25, 1995. On May 1, 1995 he sent an email about the website to a number of programmers, which caused an increase in participation. This note was posted to the "Patterns" listserv, a group of software developers gathered under the name " The Hillside Group" to develop

Erich Gamma Erich Gamma is a Swiss computer scientist and one of the four co-authors (referred to as "Gang of Four") of the software engineering textbook, '' Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software''. Gamma is an expert in the Eclipse ...

's use of object-oriented patterns. Cunningham had noticed that the older contents of the listserv tended to get buried under the more recent posts, and he proposed instead to collect ideas in a set of pages which would be collectively edited. Cunningham's post stated: "The plan is to have interested parties write web pages about the People, Projects and Patterns that have changed the way they program." He added: "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." The site was immediately popular within the pattern community.

CamelCase and internal links

Among Cunningham's innovations in creating WikiWikiWeb was the ability to easily link internally between pages; something that was often cumbersome to do in previous intranet and document management systems. Cunningham's solution to this was to automatically link any text expressed in

CamelCase Camel case (sometimes stylized as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation. The format indicates the separation of words with a single ...

; including text for which a corresponding page didn't yet exist. This

convention was used by most

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

for the first few years of wikis' existence. In 2001, the software

UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by Use ...

, which at the time was in use on

, switched to allow internal links to be done using standard spelling and double square bracket instead, in order to improve Wikipedia's usability. This square bracket syntax has since become more of a default convention for internal links within

in general.

Release of the Wiki Base software

Ward Cunningham wrote a version of his wiki software meant for public usage, called "Wiki Base". In his announcement, he wrote: "WikiWikiWeb is almost public. Actually, a pretty good clone of it is public at: https://web.archive.org/web/20030801073834/http://c2.com/cgi/wikibase. I've translated almost all of the actual wiki script into HyperPerl, a wiki-literate programming system that I think you will like." Visitors were requested to register on the wiki before they took the Wiki Base code. Cunningham expected users to fold changes back into his editable version, but those who implemented changes generally chose to distribute the modified versions on their own sites. Alternate applications for wikis began to emerge, usually imitating the look-and-feel of WikiWikiWeb/Wiki Base; such applications were originally known as "WikiWikiClones." The first one was most likely created by IBM programmer Patrick Mueller, who wrote his in the REXX language, even before Wiki Base was released.

Early wiki websites for software development

Inspired by the example of the WikiWikiWeb, programmers soon started several other wikis to build knowledge bases about programming topics. Wikis became popular in the free and open-source software (

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies * Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company *Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway * Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...

) community, where they were used for collaboratively discussing and documenting software. However, being used only by specialists, these early software-focused wikis failed to attract widespread public attention.

Growth and innovations in WikiWikiWeb from 1995 to 2000

The WikiWikiWeb website approximately doubled in size every year 1995 to 2000, with disk usage rising from around 2 megabytes in 1995 to around 60 megabytes at the end of 2000. During that time, various innovations were put in place, many suggested by users, to help with navigation and editing. These included: *1995 – RecentVisitors, PeopleIndex: pages to help users know who was contributing *1995 – NotSoRecentChanges: excess lines from the RecentChanges page were (manually) copied to a file of "ChangesIn" *1996 – EditCopy: offers the possibility to edit the backup copy of a page (this was replaced in 2002 with Page History) *1996 – ThreadMode: the form of a page where community members hold a discussion, each signing their own contribution *1996 – WikiCategories: categories can be added as an automatic index to pages *1997 – RoadMaps: proposed lists of pages to consult about specific topics, such as the Algorithms RoadMap or the Leadership RoadMap *1999 – ChangeSummary: an aid to telling which changes added interesting new content and which were only minor *2000 – UserName: the Wiki will accept a cookie that specifies a User Name to be used in place of the host name (IP identity) in the RecentChanges log "ThreadMode" was defined as "a form of discussion where our community holds a conversation." It consists of a series of signed comments added down the page in chronological order. Ward Cunningham generally frowned on ThreadMode, writing: "Chronological is only one of many possible organizations of technical writing and rarely the best one at that." Cunningham encouraged contributors to "refactor" (rewrite) the ThreadMode discussions into DocumentMode discourse. In practice many pages started out at the top in DocumentMode and degenerated into ThreadMode further down. When ThreadMode became incomprehensible the result was called "ThreadMess." (In most modern wikis the conflict between these two modes has been resolved by putting all document text on the main page of an article, and all discussion text on a talk page.) The use of categories was proposed by user Stan Silver on August 27, 1996. His initial post suggested: "If everyone adds a category and topic to their page, then the category and topic pages themselves can be used as automatic indexes into the pages." Initially Silver had proposed both categories and topics: categories denoted the specific nature of the page's subject (a book, a person, a pattern), while topics denoted the theme of the page (Java, extreme programming, Smalltalk). However, people ignored this separation, and topics were collapsed into the categories. The "ChangeSummary" option began as an aid to telling which changes added interesting new content, and which were just minor adjustments of spelling, punctuation, or correction of web links. It started when some users began taking the RecentChanges page, annotating each line with a brief description of each change, and posting the result to the ChangeSummary page. This practice was highly time-consuming and rapidly petered out, but was replaced by the "MinorEdit/RecentEdits" feature, designed to reduce the RecentChanges clutter.

Tensions within WikiWikiWeb and the creation of sister sites

Between early 1998 and the end of 2000 participation in

snowballed, and the disk space consumed by wiki pages more than quadrupled. With increased participation tensions began to appear. In 1998 proponents of

Extreme Programming Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, P ...

showed up on the site and started posting comments about Extreme Programming on most of the pages related to software development. This annoyed a number people who wanted to talk about patterns, leading to the tag "XpFreeZone," which was put onto pages as a request not to talk about ExtremeProgramming on that page. Eventually most of the DesignPatterns people left to discuss patterns on their own wikis, and WikiWikiWeb began to be referred to as "WardsWiki" instead of the "PortlandPatternRepository." Around the summer of 1999, user Sam Gentile posted the comment "I'm through here" on his user page, and began systematically removing his text from all pages on WikiWikiWeb that he had contributed to. Gentile worked at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and had been hurt by what he perceived as anti-Microsoft bias on WikiWikiWeb. His deletions led to controversy about whether he had the right to remove his own material, and whether others had the right to put it back in (which some began to do). This event became referred to as the "WikiMindWipe." In April 2000, four WikiWikiWeb users independently tried to reduce the amount of text on the site via a large number of deletions. They mainly tried to delete material that was related to wikis and not software design patterns. They considered this material to be dead weight, and would have preferred to see it all replaced by concise guidance to newcomers. Contributors who disagreed with these deletions began copying all of the deleted text back in again. A vote was taken on the issue, and it was proposed that any major reductions should be pre-announced, with an opportunity for response before action was taken. The longer-term result of the deletions was the formation of WikiWikiWeb "sister sites" later in 2000. Sunir Shah created a wiki called MeatballWiki, intended strictly for wiki-based documentation and discussions. A few months later, Richard Drake created the WhyClublet (or "Why?") wiki to host discussion of Christian issues, and Peter Merel created GreenCheeseWiki and The Reform Society to host, respectively, whimsical and political pages. Earle Martin subsequently created a catch-all for C2 off-topic pages called TheAdjunct. Many pages were moved from WikiWikiWeb to these alternative sites, with a stub of the moved page left on the WikiWikiWeb, containing a link to the new page and the message "This page exists only on SisterSites." In 2001, Cunningham and user

Bo Leuf Bo Arne Leuf (July 9, 1952 – April 24, 2009) was co-author of the book '' The Wiki Way'' (2001), written in collaboration with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham. His book ''Peer To Peer'' (2002) discusses different peer-to-peer (P2P) solutions bot ...

published a book, '' The Wiki Way'', which distilled the lessons learned during the collective experience of the first

Other wiki websites, 1999–2000

While many early wiki websites were devoted to the development of open source software, one early wiki was created by the

FoxPro FoxPro was a text-based (computing), text-based Procedural programming, procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it was also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Softwa ...

user community. The FoxPro Wiki was founded in 1999 by Steven Black and evolved into a popular site with many pages. World66 was a Dutch company which tried to transform the open content idea into a profitable business. The website was founded in 1999 by Richard and Douwe Osinga, and contains travel-related articles covering destinations around the world. A wiki forum was created in 1999 for discussion of the newly created

PhpWiki PhpWiki is a web-based wiki software application. It began as a clone of WikiWikiWeb and was the first wiki written in PHP. PhpWiki has been used to edit and format paper books for publication. History The first version, by Steve Wainstead, was re ...

software. This became one of the larger software-related wikis.

Sensei's Library Sensei's Library (commonly referred to as SL among Go-players) is an Internet website and wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contai ...

, a wiki dedicated to discussion of the game of Go, was created by Morten G. Pahle and Arno Hollosi in October 2000. For its first few years of operation, it was one of the largest and most active wikis outside Wikipedia.

Other wiki applications, 1997–2000

Clones of the WikiWikiWeb software began to be developed as soon as Ward Cunningham made the Wiki Base software available online. One of the early clones was

CvWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in Flat file database, ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages w ...

, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel, which was the first wiki application to have functioning

transclusion In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normal ...

backlinks A backlink is a Hyperlink, link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent). A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory. A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. The qu ...

, and "WayBackMode." JWiki (short for JavaWiki), released in 1997, was the first implementation of WikiWikiWeb in the Java language, and the first to be back-ended by a database. It was developed by Ricardo Clements, a former co-worker of Cunningham's. Another early wiki engine was JosWiki, developed by an international group of Java programmers who were trying to create a free and open "Java Operating System" (JOS).

TWiki TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal. Users can create wiki pages using the TWiki Markup Language, and dev ...

was created in

by Peter Thoeny in 1998, based on JosWiki. TWiki was aimed at large corporate intranets. It stored data in plain text files instead of in a database. PikiPiki was created by Martin Pool in 1999 as a rewrite of WikiWikiWeb in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

. It was made to be a small program, using flat files and doing away with versioning (Pool felt that a wiki is not meant to be a document-management system).

, created by Steve Wainstead in 1999, was the first wiki software written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

. The initial version was a feature-for-feature reimplementation of the WikiWikiWeb software. Subsequent versions adopted many features from UseModWiki.

Swiki Swiki (Squeak wiki) is wiki software written in Squeak. It was formerly used by the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing, but its use was discontinued in 2011 following a student complaint about privacy. Swiki comes bundled with ...

was written in

Squeak Squeak is an object-oriented, class-based, and reflective programming language. It was derived from Smalltalk-80 by a group that included some of Smalltalk-80's original developers, initially at Apple Computer, then at Walt Disney Imagineering, ...

by Mark Guzdial and Jochen Rick in 1999. Zwiki, written in Python in 1999, was based on the

Zope Zope is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodol ...

web application server (it could also co-exist with the Plone content management system). It was initially developed by Simon Michael and Joyful Systems. Traction TeamPage was released in December 1999; it was the first proprietary wiki application aimed at enterprise customers.

was developed from 1999 to 2000 by Clifford Adams. UseModWiki is a flat-file wiki written in Perl. It was based on Markus Denker's AtisWiki, which was in turn based on CvWiki. It introduced the square bracket syntax for linking words that was later adopted by many other wiki engines, such as MediaWiki.

MoinMoin MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine. Its name is a play on the North German greeting ''Moin'', repeated as in WikiWiki. The MoinMoin code is licensed under the GNU General Public License ...

, created in Python by Jürgen Hermann and Thomas Waldmann in mid-2000, was initially based on PikiPiki. It is a flat-file wiki with a simple code base but many possible extensions. MoinMoin uses the idea of separating the parsers (for parsing the wiki syntax) from the formatters (for outputting HTML code), with an interface between them, so that new parsers and output formatters can be written.

2001–2003: Wikipedia's early years

The creation of Wikipedia

Until 2001, wikis were virtually unknown outside the restricted circles of computer programmers. Wikis were introduced to the general public by the success of Wikipedia, a free content encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. Wikipedia was originally conceived as a complement to

Nupedia Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by ...

, a free on-line encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales, with articles written by highly qualified contributors and evaluated by an elaborate peer review process. The writing of content for Nupedia proved to be extremely slow, with only 12 articles completed during the first year, despite a mailing-list of interested editors and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief recruited by Wales,

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...

. Learning of the wiki concept, Wales and Sanger decided to try creating a collaborative website to provide an additional source of rapidly produced draft articles that could be polished for use on Nupedia. Nupedia's editors and reviewers resisted the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website, so Wikipedia was launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001. It initially ran on

software, with the original text stored in flat-files rather than in a database, and with articles named using the

convention. UseModWiki was replaced by a PHP wiki engine in January 2002 and by

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...

in July 2002. Wikipedia attracted new participants after being mentioned on

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and eval ...

as well as in an article on the community-edited website

Kuro5hin Kuro5hin (K5; read "corrosion") was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could ...

. It quickly overtook Nupedia. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created.

Wikimedia Foundation and first Wikipedia sister projects

Wales, and other members of the Wikipedia user community, founded Wikipedia's first "sister site," "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki," in October 2002; it detailed the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...

. (This project was closed in October 2006.) A second sister site,

Wiktionary Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a numbe ...

, was created in December 2002; the site was meant to be a collaboratively created dictionary. In June 2003, Wales founded the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

, a non-profit organization, to manage Wikipedia and all its sister projects going forward. Two additional Wikimedia projects were added soon thereafter:

Wikiquote Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast refer ...

, a reference for notable quotations, and

Wikibooks Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that an ...

, for collaboratively creating textbooks, both in July 2003. Another project,

Wikisource Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...

, was added in November 2003; it was originally named "Project Sourceberg" (a play on

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...

), then renamed "Wikisource" in December 2003.

Other wiki websites, 2001–2003

MeatballWiki rapidly became a popular wiki for discussions of wiki-related topics. The users of MeatballWiki came up with several ideas on the linking together of wikis, including: *InterWikiMap, a simple interwiki linking system (2000) *MetaWiki, the idea of a wiki that helps people find other wikis (not to be confused with the Wikimedia

Meta-Wiki The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

) *OneBigWiki (2002), the idea of having one wiki distributed across several servers *SwitchWiki (2003): the idea of having one site where one can switch between wikis *WikiNode, a way to link wikis via a standard "node" page on each Some of these ideas were later implemented. For example, WikiIndex, a wiki that lists other wikis, was created in 2006, in an attempt to implement the MetaWiki and SwitchWiki ideas. The site also includes a WikiNode of its own and catalogs sites which include their own WikiNodes. Disinfopedia was launched by Sheldon Rampton in March 2003. It aimed to produce a directory of public relations firms and industry-funded organizations that attempt to influence public opinion and public policy. It was later renamed

SourceWatch The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is a progressive nonprofit watchdog and advocacy organization based in Madison, Wisconsin. CMD publishes ExposedbyCMD.org, SourceWatch.org, and ALECexposed.org. History CMD was founded in 1993 by prog ...

, and is currently run by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Javapedia was a wiki inspired by Wikipedia. The project was launched in June 2003 during the JavaOne developer conference, and was intended to cover all aspects of the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

platform.

Wikitravel Wikitravel is a web-based collaborative travel guide based on the wiki format and owned by Internet Brands. It was most active from 2003 through 2012, when most of its editing community left and brought their contributions to the nonprofit Wi ...

was started in July 2003 by

Evan Prodromou Evan S. Prodromou (born 14 October 1968) is a software developer and open source advocate. His major contributions have been Wikitravel (with Michele Ann Jenkins), Identi.ca, and StatusNet. In 2015, he launched Fuzzy.ai, an artificial intell ...

and Michele Ann Jenkins.

Memory Alpha Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the ''Star Trek'' fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted ...

is a wiki devoted to the '' Star Trek'' fictional universe. It was launched by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in December 2003. For its first several years, it was one of the largest wiki projects. This period also saw the creation of several other general wiki encyclopedias, created either independently of Wikipedia or meant to serve as an alternative to Wikipedia in order to fix some perceived weakness in it: * Susning.nu was a Swedish-language wiki, created in October 2001, meant to serve as an encyclopedia, dictionary, and discussion forum. * Enciclopedia Libre was created in February 2002 as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of the Spanish-language Wikipedia, by a group of contributors to the Spanish Wikipedia, who left because of fears of censorship and the possibility of the placement of advertising on Wikipedia. *Wikinfo was launched in July 2003 as "Internet-Encyclopedia". It was a fork of the English-language Wikipedia, meant to hold original research and multiple articles on subjects from different points of view, instead of Wikipedia's policy of a single neutral-point-of-view article. In 2013, after a period of downtime, the content was removed and a new version of Wikinfo was started at

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

; however, as of June 2017, Wikinfo had been restored on wikinfo.org. Sometime later, the wikinfo.org domain lapsed from existence once again (as of January 2021). *WikiZnanie is a Russian-language wiki encyclopedia created in 2003; it took most of its content from the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary of 1906.

Development of wiki software, 2001–2003

JSPWiki, created by Janne Jalkanen in 2001, is flat-file wiki software built around

JavaServer Pages Jakarta Server Pages (JSP; formerly JavaServer Pages) is a collection of technologies that helps software developers create dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, SOAP, or other document types. Released in 1999 by Sun Microsystems, J ...

(JSP). JSPWiki adapted and extended the PhpWiki markup. It is primarily used for company and university intranets as a project wiki or a

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...

application. It has also been used as a

personal information manager A personal information manager (often referred to as a PIM tool or, more simply, a PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information manag ...

(PIM).

was written for Wikipedia in 2002 by

Lee Daniel Crocker Lee Daniel Crocker (born July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs, to address scalability problems. This software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July ...

, based on the user interface design of an earlier PHP wiki engine developed by

Magnus Manske Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24 May 1974) is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number o ...

. Manske's PHP-based software suffered load problems due to increased use, so Crocker re-wrote the software with a more scalable

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

database backend. As Wikipedia grew, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication became a major concern for the developers.

Internationalization In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

was also a major concern (the user interface has been translated into more than 70 languages). One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki and other wiki engines was the use of freely formatted links instead of links in CamelCase. MediaWiki provides specialized syntax to support rich content, such as rendering mathematical formulas using

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

, graphical plotting, image galleries and thumbnails, and Exif metadata. MediaWiki lacks native WYSIWYG support, but comes with a graphical toolbar to simplify editing. One MediaWiki innovation for structuring content is "

namespaces In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified. Namespaces ...

." Namespaces allow each article to contain multiple sheets with different standard names: one sheet presents the encyclopedic content, another contains the discussions surrounding it, and so on.

PmWiki PmWiki is wiki softwareWikiMatrix / PmWiki Features - Compare Them All
Wiki ...

was created in PHP by Patrick Michaud in 2002. It is a flat-file wiki engine that was designed to be easy to install and customize. PmWiki offers a template scheme that makes it possible to change the look and feel of the wiki. Customization is made easy through a wide selection of custom extensions, known as "recipes" available from the PmWiki Cookbook. TikiWiki was created in PHP by Luis Argerich in 2002. It was later renamed " Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware", or simply "Tiki", as it gained additional

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2 (programming language), used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum collection * Color manag ...

and groupware features. TikiWiki is modular with components that can be individually enabled and customized by the administrator, and extends customization to the user with selectable skins and themes.

Socialtext Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, ...

launched in 2002; it was the second proprietary enterprise-focused wiki application, after Traction TeamPage. As they developed, wikis incorporated many of the features used on other websites and blogs, including: *support for various wiki markup styles *editing of pages with a GUI editor, WYSIWYG, ad specific applications such as LaTeX *optional use of external editors *support for plugins and custom extensions *use of RSS feeds *integrated email discussion *precise access control *spam protection

2004–2006: an explosion in interest

The period from 2004 to 2006 saw an explosion in interest in both wikis generally and Wikipedia in particular, and both started to become household terms. Corporations, organizations and other communities began to make increasing use of wikis. Many of the wiki-based sites, technologies and events that dominate today were started during that period.

XWiki XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki is an enterprise wiki. It includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenDocument based document import/export, semantic annotations and tagging, and advanced per ...

is an open-source Java wiki application that was created by Ludovic Dubost in December 2003. Dubost set up hosting of XWiki-based wikis on the domain xwiki.com in January 2004—xwiki.com thus became an early (and possibly the first)

wiki hosting service A wiki hosting service, or wiki farm, is a server or an array of servers that offers users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis. Wiki farms are not to be confused with wiki "families", a more generic ...

, or "wiki farm." In October 2004, the wiki hosting service Wikicities launched, co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation board member Angela Beesley. In March 2006, it changed its name to

. Wikia remains one of the largest and most popular

wiki farms A wiki hosting service, or wiki farm, is a server or an array of servers that offers users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis. Wiki farms are not to be confused with wiki "families", a more generic ...

. A large number of other notable wiki farms were released soon afterward, including

Wikispaces Wikispaces was a wiki hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched by Tangient LLC in March 2005, Wikispaces was purchased by Tes Global (formerly TSL Education) in March 2014. It competed with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and Googl ...

(launched March 2005), PBwiki (launched June 2005, later renamed PBworks), and

Wetpaint Wetpaint was an Internet company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Function(X). Founded in 2005, Wetpaint both published the website Wetpaint Entertainment, focused on entertainment news, and developed a proprietary technology platform, the Socia ...

(launched October 2005). Wikidot was launched in August 2006. 2005 marked the beginning of large-scale wiki-related meetings and conferences. August 2005 saw the first-ever

Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

, an annual conference organized around Wikimedia Foundation projects, in

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , " Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on it ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. WikiSym, a more academic annual symposium about wikis in general, was first held a few months later, in October 2005, in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

; in 2014 it was renamed to

OpenSym OpenSym is a shorthand for International Symposium on Open Collaboration, formerly International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, also formerly WikiSym or the Wiki Symposium, a conference dedicated to wiki research and practice. In 20 ...

. RecentChangesCamp, an

unconference An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and t ...

dedicated to wikis, was first held in February 2006 in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

. Wikimania and OpenSym remain the two largest wiki-related gatherings. Around 2005 wikis began to be massively confronted with "wiki spam," produced by spammers who enter website addresses onto wikis in order to improve the ranking of the displayed websites by search engines. Various strategies have been developed to counter wiki spam.

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects

Wikipedia experienced exponential growth in usage and readership during the period from 2004 to 2006, rising in

Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People * Alexa (name), a given name a ...

rankings from the top 1000 websites into the top 15. It was named one of the top 5 global brands of 2006 in the

Brandchannel Brandchannel is a website about brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for ...

Readers' Choice Awards. In 2004, the Wikimedia Foundation launched three new sites:

Wikispecies Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive open content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wa ...

, for cataloging species, in August 2004,

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

, to hold images and other media used by the Wikimedia projects, in September 2004, and

Wikinews Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be ...

, for publishing collaborative news articles, in December 2004.

Wikiversity Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...

, intended for tutorials and other courseware, was later launched in August 2006. In November 2005, journalist

John Seigenthaler John Lawrence Seigenthaler ( ; July 27, 1927 – July 11, 2014) was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights. Seigenthaler joined the Nashville newspaper ''The ...

wrote a much-publicized article in ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (stylized in all uppercase) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virgi ...

'' about Wikipedia's article about him, which for over four months had contained a false statement about him, inserted as a joke, stating that he had been a suspect in the assassinations of

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination ...

and

Robert F. Kennedy Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...

. The ''USA Today'' article generated a subsequent controversy that both caused Wikipedia to tighten its standards for creating articles, especially articles about living people, and highlighted the growing importance of Wikipedia as a source of information. During this period, Wikipedia also began to enter the popular culture. A prominent example was the

Weird Al Yankovic Weird derives from the Anglo-Saxon word Wyrd, meaning fate or destiny. In modern English it has acquired the meaning of “strange or uncanny”. It may also refer to: Places * Weird Lake, a lake in Minnesota, U.S. People *"Weird Al" Yankovic ...

parody song " White & Nerdy," which peaked at #9 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 in late 2006, and contained the lyric "I edit Wikipedia." In December 2006, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' magazine chose "

You In Modern English, ''you'' is the second-person pronoun. It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers. History ''You'' comes from the Proto- ...

" as their Person of the Year, referring to the rise of

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

and web technologies that allow for user-contributed content, and cited Wikipedia as one of the key websites that allow for "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before."

Other wiki websites, 2004–2006

In July 2004, OpenStreetMap, a website to create an open-source street map of the world using wiki functionality, was launched. Most of the major parody-based wikis launched at around this time.

Encyclopedia Dramatica Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED; also spelled Encyclopædia Dramatica) is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google ...

, which mocked

internet culture Internet culture is a culture based on the many way people have used computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Some features of Internet culture include online communities, gaming, and social medi ...

, was founded in December 2004 (it was shut down in April 2011). Stupidedia, a

German-language German ( ) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also a ...

wiki intended as a direct spoof of Wikipedia, was also founded in December 2004, a week later. Uncyclopedia, an English-language wiki also intended to parody Wikipedia, was founded the next month, in January 2005; it was later extended to dozens of other languages, and merged in other wikis, including Stupidedia. La Frikipedia, a Spanish-language parody of Wikipedia, was founded in October 2005. In January 2005, the wiki

wikiHow wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of ope ...

was created as a component of the how-to website

eHow eHow is an online how-to guide with many articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow use ...

. In April 2006, its creators sold off eHow and focused full-time on wikiHow, which was launched at its own domain. Both sites receive tens of millions of hits a month. In April 2006, the company

Internet Brands MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands is an American new media company based in El Segundo, California, United States, that operates online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The company also develops and licenses internet ...

bought the sites WikiTravel and World66. The purchase of WikiTravel by a commercial entity led to the creation of the non-commercial travel wiki

Wikivoyage Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...

by some former WikiTravel authors and administrators in December 2006. Wikivoyage originally held content in German and Italian, and started as a fork of WikiTravel content; in 2013 it would become a WMF site. Two major

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

wiki encyclopedias began in 2006:

Baidu Baike Baidu Baike (; , also known as Baidu Wiki) is a semi-regulated Chinese-language collaborative online encyclopedia owned by the Chinese technology company Baidu. The beta version was launched on April 20, 2006, and the official version was lau ...

in April and Hudong in November. (Hudong's English-language name was changed to

Baike.com Baike.com (), formerly Hudong and Hoodong (), is a for-profit social network in Chinese, including the world's largest Chinese encyclopedia. It is one of the two largest wikis in China, along with Baidu Baike, claiming to have more than 18 milli ...

in 2012.) Both currently hold millions of articles, and exceed the popularity of the

Chinese Wikipedia The Chinese Wikipedia () is the written vernacular Chinese (a form of Mandarin Chinese) edition of Wikipedia. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001, the Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles and registered users, o ...

within China. Both are for-profit wikis, that, unlike Wikipedia, hold the copyright to their own content.

Development of wiki software, 2004–2006

This period saw the launch of many wiki applications geared toward corporate/enterprise users. Such software was usually

proprietary {{Short pages monitor