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The history of wikis began in 1994, when
Ward Cunningham Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki Excerpt from 2014 book '' The Innovators''. and was a co-author of the '' Manifesto for Agile Software Development''. Called a pioneer, and ...
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 and has been a read-only archive since 2015. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' originally also applied to the wiki software that o ...
" 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 application ...
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 a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...
, 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 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals and gate ...
" at
Honolulu International Airport Daniel K. Inouye International Airport , also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the main and largest airport in Hawaii.
, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick". Wiki software has some conceptual origins in the
version control Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code t ...
and
hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...
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, World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almo ...
's proposed "
memex A memex (from "memory expansion") 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 w ...
" system in 1945, the collaborative hypertext database ZOG in 1972, the
NoteCards NoteCards was a hypertext-based personal knowledge base system developed at PARC (company), Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards was developed after Trigg's pioneering 1983 Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. thes ...
system from
Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...
, the
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
hypertext system
HyperCard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...
. 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 free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
, 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
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II, World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almo ...
's vision of the "
memex A memex (from "memory expansion") 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 w ...
", a
microfilm A microform is a scaled-down reproduction of a document, typically either photographic film or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original d ...
reader which would create automated links between documents. In a 1945 essay in '' Atlantic Monthly'' titled "
As We May Think "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
", 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 or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
, 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 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 university, private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became t ...
. 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 Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typic ...
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 Knowledge is an awareness of facts, a familiarity with individuals and situations, or a practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often characterized as true belief that is distinct from opinion or gu ...
(KMS). KMS was a collaborative tool based on direct manipulation, 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 NoteCards was a hypertext-based personal knowledge base system developed at PARC (company), Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards was developed after Trigg's pioneering 1983 Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. thes ...
system, developed in 1984 and released by
Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...
in 1985; Janet Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner, created in 1985 for the operation manuals of
Symbolics Symbolics, Inc., is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp (programming language), Lisp sy ...
computers; and Bill Atkinson's WildCard application, on which he began work in 1985, and which was released in 1987 as
HyperCard HyperCard is a application software, software application and software development kit, development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard com ...
. 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, 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 did not exist yet; creating such a link would in turn create a new blank card.


The World Wide Web

In 1990,
Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...
of
CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
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 not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...
, 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, 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 (masonry), mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and ...
graphical browser in 1993, which gained wide popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia. In April 1993, 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 Howard G. Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki Excerpt from 2014 book '' The Innovators''. and was a co-author of the '' Manifesto for Agile Software Development''. Called a pioneer, and ...
started developing the
WikiWikiWeb The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham and has been a read-only archive since 2015. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' originally also applied to the wiki software that o ...
in 1994 as a supplement to the
Portland Pattern Repository The Portland Pattern Repository (PPR) is an online repository for computer programming software design patterns. It was accompanied by the website WikiWikiWeb, the world's first wiki. The repository has an emphasis on extreme programming, and i ...
, a website containing documentation about
software design pattern In software engineering, a software design pattern or design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in many contexts in software design. A design pattern is not a rigid structure to be transplanted directly into s ...
s, a particular approach to
object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...
. 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 high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...
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
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 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time, carrying people and baggage between the various terminals and gate ...
at
Honolulu International Airport Daniel K. Inouye International Airport , also known as Honolulu International Airport, is the main and largest airport in Hawaii.
. Cunningham installed a prototype of the software on his company 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 The term Listserv (styled by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV) has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications in general, but is more properly applied to a few early instances of ...
, a group of software developers gathered under the name "
The Hillside Group The Hillside Group is an educational nonprofit organization founded in August 1993 to help Programmer, software developers analyze and document common development and design problems as software design patterns. The Hillside Group supports the pat ...
" to develop Erich Gamma'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, including text for which a corresponding page did not yet exist. This CamelCase convention was used by most
wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...
software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
for the first few years of wikis' existence. In 2001, the software UseModWiki, which at the time was in use on
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
, 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 In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...
has since become more of a default convention for internal links within
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 application ...
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 Rexx (restructured extended executor) is a high-level programming language developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw. Both proprietary and open-source software, open source Rexx interpreter (computing), interpreters exist for a wide range of comput ...
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) 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
WikiWikiWeb The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham and has been a read-only archive since 2015. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' originally also applied to the wiki software that o ...
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, ...
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 of 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 corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
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 A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ. Christians form the largest religious community in the wo ...
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 published a book, '' The Wiki Way'', which distilled the lessons learned during the collective experience of the first
wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...
.


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 is a text-based (computing), text-based Procedural programming, procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it is also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Softwar ...
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 software. This became one of the larger software-related wikis. Sensei's Library, 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, 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 norma ...
, backlinks, 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 was created in
Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...
by Peter Thoeny in 1998, based on JosWiki. TWiki was aimed at large corporate
intranet An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in ...
s. 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. 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). PhpWiki, created by Steve Wainstead in 1999, was the first wiki software written in PHP. The initial version was a feature-for-feature reimplementation of the WikiWikiWeb software. Subsequent versions adopted many features from UseModWiki. Swiki 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 Imaginee ...
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 software, free and open-source World Wide Web, web application servers written in Python (programming language), Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environm ...
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. UseModWiki 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, 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.


Wikipedia's early years: 2001–2003


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 a multi-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject-matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy ...
, a free on-line encyclopedia founded by
Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
, 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 Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, ...
. 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 UseModWiki software, with the original text stored in flat-files rather than in a database, and with articles named using the CamelCase convention. UseModWiki was replaced by a PHP wiki engine in January 2002 and by
MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...
in July 2002. Wikipedia attracted new participants after being mentioned on
Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...
as well as in an article on the community-edited website Kuro5hin. 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, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
. (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 number o ...
, 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. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
, a non-profit organization, to manage Wikipedia and all its sister projects going forward. Two additional Wikimedia projects were added soon thereafter:
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. The project's objective is to collaboratively produce a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films, proverbs, etc. and ...
, a reference for notable quotations, and Wikibooks, for collaboratively creating textbooks, both in July 2003. Another project,
Wikisource Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...
, 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 li ...
), 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) *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. * WackoWiki (2003), Fork from WikkaWiki one of the more than 100 Wiki Engines, that helped foster Wiki principles usage and development 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 is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...
platform. Wikitravel was started in July 2003 by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Memory Alpha is a wiki devoted to the ''
Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the Star Trek: The Original Series, series of the same name and became a worldwide Popular culture, pop-culture Cultural influence of ...
'' 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 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 and Wikia) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e., video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). The Privately held company, privately held for-profit Delaware ...
; 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 The ''Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary'' (35 volumes, small; 86 volumes, large) is a comprehensive multi-volume encyclopaedia in Russian. It contains 121,240 articles, 7,800 images, and 235 maps. It was published in the Russian Em ...
of 1906.


Development of wiki software, 2001–2003

JSPWiki, created by Janne Jalkanen in 2001, is flat-file wiki software built around JavaServer Pages (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 set of procedures for producing, disseminating, utilizing, and overseeing an organization's knowledge and data. It alludes to a multidisciplinary strategy that maximizes knowledge utilization to accomplish organ ...
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 mana ...
(PIM).
MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...
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 Jul ...
, based on the user interface design of an earlier PHP wiki engine developed by
Magnus Manske Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24May 1974) is a German biochemist who is a leading researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of th ...
. 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 software, 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 rel ...
database backend. As Wikipedia grew, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication became a major concern for the developers.
Internationalization 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 strategy not only for ...
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. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...
, graphical plotting, image galleries and
thumbnails Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index (publishing), index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search ...
, 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 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 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 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, and 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


Explosion in interest: 2004–2006

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 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, 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 Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e., video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). The Privately held company, privately held for-profit Delaware ...
. Wikia remains one of the largest and most popular wiki farms. A large number of other notable wiki farms were released soon afterward, including Wikispaces (launched March 2005), PBwiki (launched June 2005, later renamed PBworks), and Wetpaint (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 Wikimedian, volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source ...
, an annual conference organized around Wikimedia Foundation projects, in
Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
. 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 coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
,
California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
; in 2014 it was renamed to OpenSym. RecentChangesCamp, an
unconference An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organizati ...
dedicated to wikis, was first held in February 2006 in
Portland, Oregon Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...
. 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 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 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 Wales s ...
, for cataloging species, in August 2004,
Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based Digital library, media repository of Open content, free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used ...
, 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 Wikimedia project, project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism through user-created content. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipe ...
, 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 wrote a much-publicized article in ''
USA Today ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...
'' 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 and Robert F. Kennedy. 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 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 continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' magazine chose "
You In Modern English, the word "''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 ...
" 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, a ...
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 OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...
, 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, which mocked
internet culture Internet culture refers to culture developed and maintained among frequent and active users of the Internet (also known as netizens) who primarily communicate with one another as members of online communities; that is, a culture whose influence ...
, was founded in December 2004 (it was shut down in April 2011). Stupidedia, a
German-language German (, ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. It is 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 Spanish () or Castilian () is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a world language, gl ...
parody of Wikipedia, was founded in October 2005. In January 2005, the wiki
wikiHow wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring informational articles and quizzes 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 ...
was created as a component of the how-to website eHow. 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 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 wiki encyclopedias began in 2006: Baidu Baike in April and Hudong in November. (Hudong's English-language name was changed to Baike.com in 2012.) Both currently hold millions of articles, and exceed the popularity of the
Chinese Wikipedia The Chinese Wikipedia () is the written vernacular Chinese edition of Wikipedia. It was created on 11 May 2001. It is one of multiple projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. The Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles, registered ...
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, and it usually included additional functionality, such as
blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
s and project management tools. Notable wiki software launched during this time includes: *
Trac Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Tr ...
(February 2004), created by Edgewall Software. Trac is an open source
bug tracking Tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those used ...
and project management application, with wiki functionality. *
Confluence In geography, a confluence (also ''conflux'') occurs where two or more watercourses join to form a single channel (geography), channel. A confluence can occur in several configurations: at the point where a tributary joins a larger river (main ...
(March 2004), created by
Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australia, Australian-United States, American proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management. Domicile (law), Domiciled in ...
. * DokuWiki (July 2004), an open-source application intended for small companies' documentation needs. * FlexWiki (September 2004), an open source application created by
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
. Written primarily by David Ornstein, FlexWiki used
.NET The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...
technology and had an integrated scripting language called WikiTalk (based on
Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...
). It stored content in either text files or a SQL Server database. * JotSpot (October 2004), created by JotSpot, Inc. JotSpot was bought by
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
in 2006 for an undisclosed amount; Google would later release the technology, in modified form, as
Google Sites Google Sites is a structured wiki and web page creation tool included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. The service includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google For ...
in 2008. * SamePage (April 2006), created by eTouch Systems. * Redmine (June 2006), an open source application similar to Trac. * DekiWiki (July 2006), an open source application created by MindTouch, Inc. It had started as a fork of MediaWiki, but was then significantly rewritten before its release. DekiWiki was later renamed to "Deki", then " MindTouch Core". * Clearspace (December 2006), created by Jive Software. Clearspace was later renamed "Jive SBS", then "Jive Engage" and then Jive. wikiCalc, a wiki-based
spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...
application, was launched in November 2005 by spreadsheet pioneer
Dan Bricklin Daniel Singer Bricklin (born July 16, 1951) is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, ...
. In November 2006 Microsoft released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which included wiki and blog functionality for the first time. In this period a number of semantic wiki applications were launched, including the currently most popular one, Semantic MediaWiki (which was first announced at
Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by Wikimedian, volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source ...
2005 2005 was designated as the International Year for Sport and Physical Education and the International Year of Microcredit. The beginning of 2005 also marked the end of the International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples, Internationa ...
).


Wikis enter the mainstream: 2007–2013

A milestone in public acceptance of wikis was reached in March 2007 when the word "wiki" entered the
Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...
. In January 2007,
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...
released Amapedia, a product-review wiki on its own website; it was shut down in June 2010. In 2007, ShoutWiki, a wiki farm, was founded as an alternative to Wikia. In the same year, Encyc was founded using PmWiki, and in 2008 it transitioned to MediaWiki. Another MediaWiki-based wiki farm, MyWikis, was launched in 2012. In February 2007,
Penguin Books Penguin Books Limited is a Germany, German-owned English publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers the Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the ...
launched a wiki to create the planned novel '' A Million Penguins'', in a well-publicized experiment at creating a crowd-generated novel. The wiki was shut down a month later, not having created a coherent work. In March 2007,
Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, ...
, co-founder of Wikipedia, launched
Citizendium Citizendium ( ; "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English language, English-language wiki-based free content, free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia. Larry Sanger had worked as paid ...
, an "expert-guided" encyclopedia wiki requiring participants to use their real names. In 2010, the site
WikiLeaks WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...
(which had been founded in 2006) gained a great deal of both fame and notoriety as a result of a set of leaked documents the site published of classified materials from the
United States government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the Federation#Federal governments, national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct ...
, notably footage of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike, the Afghan War documents leak and the United States diplomatic cables leak. The site was initially a true wiki editable by anyone, running on the MediaWiki application, though in 2010 had its permissions changed so that only its administrators could edit pages, and later it moved off of MediaWiki and was no longer a wiki.


Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, 2007–2013

In 2007, Wikipedia entered the top 10 most popular websites in the world. Wikipedia began to be heavily referenced in television and other media during 2007; see Wikipedia in culture. In August 2008, then-U.S. presidential candidate
John McCain John Sidney McCain III (August 29, 1936 – August 25, 2018) was an American statesman and United States Navy, naval officer who represented the Arizona, state of Arizona in United States Congress, Congress for over 35 years, first as ...
was accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in a speech about
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the South Caucasus * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the southeastern United States Georgia may also refer to: People and fictional characters * Georgia (name), a list of pe ...
. In June 2009, journalist Chris Anderson admitted to plagiarizing a series of Wikipedia articles in his book '' Free: The Future of a Radical Price''. Anderson called it a "screwup", based on lack of clarity on how to cite a specific version of a Wikipedia article. January 2011 saw the 10th anniversary of the creation of Wikipedia, with a large round of coverage in the international media, most of it positive, including a cover story in German newspaper ''
Die Zeit (, ) is a German national weekly newspaper published in Hamburg in Germany. The newspaper is generally considered to be among the German newspapers of record and is known for its long and extensive articles. History The first edition of was ...
'' with the headline, "The greatest work of mankind." In March 2012, a proposal was made to have the Wikimedia Foundation host a wiki containing travel advice, which led to a discussion and vote lasting several months. In August 2012 the company Internet Brands, owners of the Wikitravel site, sued two of its contributors who had spoken out in favor of the proposal. That lawsuit in turn led the Wikimedia Foundation to sue Internet Brands in September 2012 to not "impede, disrupt or block the creation of" such a site. The community proposal to host a travel guide wiki was successful, and the decision was made to incorporate
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 ...
, a Wikitravel spinoff site, as a project. The
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...
project, which had been discussed in various guises for some time, was officially launched on October 30, 2012. Wikidata is a collaborative data repository meant to provide data that can be used by Wikipedia across all its languages. January 14, 2013, saw the first official use of Wikidata: to enable the automatic display of "interlanguage links" within articles on the Hungarian Wikipedia. January 15, 2013, the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia's founding, saw the launch of the new, Wikimedia-hosted Wikivoyage. The lawsuits regarding Wikivoyage between Wikimedia and Internet Brands were settled out of court the next month.


Reuse of Wikipedia data

Several applications were developed during this time to make use of Wikipedia's data in order to improve both structured querying and natural-language searching. These included: *
DBpedia DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web using OpenLink Virtuoso. DBpedia a ...
, launched in January 2007; a project to publish structured data from Wikipedia in machine-readable, queriable form. By 2008, it became a major component of the
Linked Data In computing, linked data is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web ...
initiative. * Freebase, launched by the company Metaweb in May 2007. Freebase stores information from Wikipedia and other sources in a structured, queriable format. Metaweb and Freebase were bought by Google in July 2010. The software later provided part of the technology behind the
Google Knowledge Graph The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance, as an instant answer. The data is generated automatical ...
, launched in May 2012. *
Powerset In mathematics, the power set (or powerset) of a set is the set of all subsets of , including the empty set and itself. In axiomatic set theory (as developed, for example, in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is po ...
, a company founded in 2005, in May 2008 released a search engine that used data from the English Wikipedia to answer natural-language queries. It was bought by Microsoft in July 2008, with the goal of improving results for the
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
search engine. The Wikimedia Foundation project
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...
is meant to provide a collaborative set of data that can make such querying easier, and available across all languages.


Wiki software, 2007–2013

This period saw consolidation in the set of wiki software being used. A large number of wiki engines ended development during this time, including FlexWiki, MojoMojo, UseModWiki and Zwiki. In October 2008, most developers of TWiki left the project to work on a fork of the code, Foswiki, after creator Peter Thoeny took control of the TWiki code and trademark via his company, TWiki.net. In May 2009, Google announced its
Google Wave Google Wave, later known as Apache Wave, is a discontinued software framework for Collaborative real-time editor, real-time collaborative online editing. Originally developed by Google and announced on May 28, 2009, it was renamed to ''Apache Wa ...
platform (and its associated Federation protocol), which would combine the functionality of wikis with e-mail, instant messaging and social networking in order to provide a collaborative, real-time, server-hosted communication platform. Google Wave was released to the general public in May 2010, but development on it was ended several months later, in August 2010. In December 2010, Google transferred control of the software's development to the Apache Foundation, and it was renamed "Apache Wave." In December 2010, wiki functionality was added to the SAP NetWeaver Portal application. In 2011, a wiki application, named Phriction, was added to the open-source collaboration suite Phabricator. In April 2013, MindTouch Inc. abandoned its open-source product and moved to MindTouch being only a proprietary, hosted service. In July 2013, Wetpaint sold off its wiki service to WikiFoundry, having changed its business model to the hosting of professionally generated content.


Further consolidation and innovation: 2014–present

The period starting in 2014 saw a further decrease in wiki software offerings, as applications and hosted solutions including Apache Wave, MindTouch, SamePage, TWiki and Wikispaces stopped development. Conversely, a number of new proprietary hosted knowledge-management solutions, which include a wiki component, were launched, including Notion in 2016. The MediaWiki-based hosting site Miraheze launched in 2015. The site
Everipedia Everipedia (), renamed IQ.wiki in 2022, is a blockchain-based online encyclopedia. Everipedia was founded in 2014 and was officially launched in 2015, as a fork of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger (who co-founded Wikipedia) joined the company in 2017, ...
, a competitor to Wikipedia that stores its information on a
blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...
, launched in 2015. Wikia was gradually renamed to
Fandom A fandom is a subculture composed of Fan (person), fans characterized by a feeling of camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significan ...
between 2016 and 2021.


See also

* Comparison of wiki software *
History of Wikipedia Wikipedia, a free content, free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its First Wikipedia edit, first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered ...
* List of wiki software *
List of wikis This article contains a list of notable wikis, which are websites that use wiki software, allowing users to collaboratively edit content and view old versions of the content. These websites use several different wiki software packages. Table ...
* meta:List of largest wikis


References

{{Wiki topics *
Wikis A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...