You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story

The Daily Beast tells the story of Walter Isaacson’s newest book on he founders of Wikipedia.

In his new book, The Innovators, Walter Isaacson recounts the remarkable story of the online encyclopedia that has continually defied its detractors. When Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web in 1991, he intended it to be a tool for collaboration, but the Mosaic browser did not provide users with the ability to edit the pages they were viewing. This was partially remedied by the rise of blogging, which encouraged user-generated content. 

In 1995, Ward Cunningham, an Indiana native with a passion for ham radios and the global communities they fostered, invented a new medium to facilitate collaboration on the Web. Known as a wiki, it allowed users to modify Web pages by clicking and typing directly onto pages running wiki software. Cunningham had previously worked at an electronic equipment company, Tektronix, where he had been assigned to keep track of projects, similar to Berners-Lee’s task at CERN. 

Inspired by Bill Atkinson’s superb software product, HyperCard, Cunningham modified it to create a simple way of creating new cards and links. HyperCard was given away free with Apple computers, and it was easy to use, even for children. Cunningham then wrote a few hundred lines of Perl code to create an Internet version of his HyperText program, producing a content management application that enabled users to edit and contribute to a Web page. He called this service the Portland Pattern Repository, and it allowed software developers to share programming ideas and improve on the patterns posted by others. 

When it came to naming his application, Cunningham wanted something quick, and he remembered the Hawaiian word ‘wiki’ for quick, which he had heard during his honeymoon in Hawaii thirteen years earlier. He thus named his Web pages and the software that ran them WikiWikiWeb, or wiki for short.

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