The Famous Wiki Wiki Shuttle Bus at Honolulu Airport
Today I found out where the word “wiki” comes from.
Howard G. Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki which was launched in 1995 called WikiWikiWeb, upon his first visit to Hawaii was informed by an airport employee that he needed to take the wiki wiki bus between the air port’s terminals. Not understanding what the person was telling him, he inquired further and found out “wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian; by repeating the word, it gives additional emphasis and thus means “very quick”.
Later, Cunningham was looking for a suitable name for his new web platform. He wanted something that was unique, as he wasn’t copying any existing medium, so something simple like how email was named after “mail” wouldn’t work. He eventually settled on wanting to call it something to the effect of “quick web”, modeling after Microsoft’s “quick basic” name. But he didn’t like the sound of that, so substituted “quick” with the Hawaiian, “wiki wiki”, using the doubled form as it seemed to fit; “…doublings in my application are formatting clues: double carriage return = new paragraph; double single quote = italic; double capitalized word = hyperlink.” The program was also extremely quick, so the “very quick” doubling worked in that sense as well.
The shorter version of the name, calling a wiki just “wiki” instead of “Wiki Wiki” came about because Cunningham’s first implementation of WikiWikiWeb named the original cgi script “wiki”; all lower case and abbreviated in the standard Unix fashion. Thus, the first wiki url was http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. People latched on to this and simply called it a “wiki” instead of a“Wiki Wiki”.
It should also be noted that the proper pronunciation of “wiki” is actually “we-key”, rather than the way most today pronounced it, “wick-ee”. However, given the popularity of the mispronunciation of the word, Cunningham and others have long since stopped trying to correct people on the matter.
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Bonus Facts:
- The word “wiki” has been backronymed by many to mean “What I Know Is”.
- Wiki was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on March 15, 2007.
- The most famous of all wiki’s, Wikipedia, was launched on January 15, 2001. The word got out fast about this fledgling site with grand ambitions through Slashdot and gained a lot of early contributors through Nupedia, which by 2003 was shut down with all its articles being incorporated into Wikipedia.
- By the end of 2001, Wikipedia had approximately 20,000 articles written in 18 different languages.
- On September 9, 2007, Wikipedia broke a 600 year old record for the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing 2 million articles. The encyclopedia it surpassed was the Yongle Encyclopedia of 1407.
- Wikipedia currently uses the open source software MediaWiki, written by Lee Daniel Crocker, as its platform. This is written in PHP with MySQL as its back end. Originally though, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, which was written in Perl by Clifford Adams. Within a year of the launch, they switched to a custom PHP/MySQL platform written by Magnus Manske. Within 6 months after that, they switched to the above MediaWiki with several custom extensions installed.
- Wikipedia receives between 25,000-60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.
- The original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was added to Cunningham’s Cunningham and Cunningham software consultancy website c2.com on March 25, 1995. This was an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository.
- Cunnigham not only developed the first wiki, but also is a pioneer in program design patterns and Extreme Programming. He currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon and is the chief technology officer for AboutUs.
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1. A collaborative Web site comprised of the perpetual collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site using a browser interface, including the work of previous authors. In contrast, a blog, typically authored by an individual, does not allow visitors to change the original posted material, only add comments to the original content. The term wiki refers to either the Web site or the software used to create the site. The first wiki was created by Ward Cunnigham in 1995
2. Wiki wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian.
3. A person standing behind the wicket in cricket.
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An essentially omnicontextual word that can be utilized in an endless number of ways, from being an exclamatory particle to an always convenient filler word. ‘Wiki’ can never really be overused, owing precisely to its almost infinite range of nuance, expression, wordplay and compound possibilities. It could be said to be the most versatile word in the English language.
«I totally wikied it up.»
«That’s pretty wiki»
«There’s a wiki in my pants…how the wiki did that get there»
«Wiki!»
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Anyone who’s been watching the news will have heard about Wikileaks by now. Wikipedia shares the generic “wiki-” prefix in its name, but there’s no relation. Occasionally even major news sources like the BBC get this wrong, which can lead to serious confusion, even when it’s quickly fixed.
If anyone has a claim to the word “wiki”, it would be the Hawaiian people. In the Hawaiian language, wiki means “quick”. The words “wiki wiki” on a shuttle bus in Honolulu inspired software engineer Ward Cunningham to name a revolutionary piece of software – the “WikiWikiWeb” – in 1995. This software allowed people to instantly edit web pages, collaboratively.
Wikipedia was created six years later, based on the same principles. By that time, the word “wiki” was used already by a ton of different wiki software implementations. Today, you can go to the “WikiMatrix” website to compare them all. They have names like Wikidot, TWiki, or Wikispaces. Moreover, there are many, many content websites that use “wiki” in their names. Among them are Wikihow, Wikitravel, WikiAnswers, and Wikia.
Most of these projects are completely unrelated to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2003. The Wikimedia Foundation operates a number of other free knowledge projects: Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikiversity. It also organizes and supports development of the MediaWiki open source software.
The names of Wikimedia’s projects are trademarked. The word “wiki” isn’t: anyone can use it. Wikileaks and most other projects with “wiki” in their name have no relationship with us. If you see news organizations making this error, please email them or post a comment pointing to this blog post.
Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.
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| Definition | : | Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast” |
| Category | : | Computing » Internet |
| Country/Region | : | Worldwide  |
| Popularity | : |
What does Wiki mean?
Wiki (pronounce: we-key) is a piece of server software that allows multiple users to create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wikipedia is one of the most popular wikis on the web.
The very first Wiki software was called WikiWikiWeb which was developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning “fast” or “quick” in English. Ward Cunningham, upon his first visit to Hawaii, was informed by an airport employee that he needed to take the WIKI WIKI bus between the air port’s terminals. Not understanding what the person was telling him, he inquired further and found out “wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian, and wiki wiki implies very quick. Later, Cunningham was looking for a suitable name for his new web platform.
The name WIKI WIKI inspired Ward Cunningham to call his new web platform WikiWikiWeb. WikiWikiWeb was later called wiki because Cunningham’s first implementation of WikiWikiWeb named the original CGI script “wiki”; all lower case and abbreviated in the standard Unix fashion.
Thus, the first wiki URL was http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. People latched on to this and simply called it “wiki” instead of “Wiki Wiki”.