Dear all, Today is the 30th birthday of the wiki! On March 25, 1995, Ward Cunningham launched the WikiWikiWeb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb), hosted on his site c2.com. Ward was interested in programming patterns. He had earlier worked on HyperCard, a proto-internet technology that imagined linked applications and databases, and was influenced by object-oriented programming and by city planning, particularly the classic "A Pattern Language". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language).
As those of us who are wiki editors know, the wiki brought two new things to the table: a design of linked pages, and a user-editable interface. (Remember, this was before Facebook, Twitter, Google docs... anything else that we think of as the easily user-editable web). Five years later, Wikipedia would be launched -- but before Wikipedia, and continuing to this day, there were many other wikis on various topics as well as many kinds of wiki software. Some of the earliest (and my favorites) envisioned wikis as a community space - a new kind of thinking about both information design and how people can participate online. For instance, in the meatballwiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeatballWiki), we talked about how to use wikis as an organization tool for people and about what the concepts are that make a successful wiki, which also means the concepts for building a successful community. Ward's ideas changed how we think of the "editable web" and what might be possible to build among a decentralized, distributed group of people -- truly an optimistic idea not just about software but also about society that I think we still need today, and maybe more than ever in these troubled, fractious times. The idea that a distributed and diverse group of people can come together under the umbrella of a wiki and build a community through developing shared patterns - the barnraising, the hyperlink -- still brings me hope and joy. Thanks Ward, and happy birthday wiki! And if you would like to join an editable birthday card, there's one here: https://wikiindex.org/w/30th_WikiBirthday#WikiBirthdayCard -- Phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *
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