History of wikis
[4] A distant precursor of the wiki concept was Vannevar Bush's vision of the "memex", a microfilm reader which would create automated links between documents.
In 1972 Kristo Ivanov published a PhD dissertation on Quality-control of information,[7] containing a theoretical basis for what corresponds to the wiki-idea, in terms of systemic social interaction.
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.
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, ...).
[8] 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.
[1] 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'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."
[1] 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.
[17] 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.
"[19][better source needed] In April 2000, four WikiWikiWeb users independently tried to reduce the amount of text on the site via a large number of deletions.
[citation needed] 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).
[citation needed] Zwiki, written in Python in 1999, was based on the Zope web application server (it could also co-exist with the Plone content management system).
[4] Wikipedia was originally conceived as a complement to Nupedia, 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.
[4] 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.
[4] 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.
Two additional Wikimedia projects were added soon thereafter: Wikiquote, a reference for notable quotations, and Wikibooks, for collaboratively creating textbooks, both in July 2003.
MediaWiki was written for Wikipedia in 2002 by Lee Daniel Crocker, based on the user interface design of an earlier PHP wiki engine developed by Magnus Manske.
MediaWiki provides specialized syntax to support rich content, such as rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX, graphical plotting, image galleries and thumbnails, and Exif metadata.
In October 2004, the wiki hosting service Wikicities launched, co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation board member Angela Beesley.
WikiSym, a more academic annual symposium about wikis in general, was first held a few months later, in October 2005, in San Diego, California; in 2014 it was renamed to OpenSym.
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."
[49] In March 2007, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, launched Citizendium, an "expert-guided" encyclopedia wiki requiring participants to use their real names.
[51] In June 2009, journalist Chris Anderson admitted to plagiarizing a series of Wikipedia articles in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
[52] 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 with the headline, "The greatest work of mankind.
"[53] In March 2012, a proposal was made to have the Wikimedia Foundation host a wiki containing travel advice,[54] which led to a discussion and vote lasting several months.
[55] 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.
[56] The community proposal to host a travel guide wiki was successful, and the decision was made to incorporate Wikivoyage, a Wikitravel spinoff site, as a project.
These included: The Wikimedia Foundation project Wikidata is meant to provide a collaborative set of data that can make such querying easier, and available across all languages.
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.
