Wiki

A wiki is a website whose pages any visitor can create or edit directly through an ordinary web browser, without needing separate software or specialized technical skill, so that its content is built collaboratively by its own readers rather than by a single publisher. The American programmer Ward Cunningham built the first wiki, describing it at the time as the simplest online database that could possibly work, beginning development in 1994 and launching the site, called WikiWikiWeb, on March 25, 1995, at the domain c2.com. He took the name from Hawaiian, recalling an airport employee who had directed him to the 'Wiki Wiki Shuttle' bus at Honolulu International Airport, and adopted the doubled word as a stand-in for 'quick.' The wiki model spread through the early 2000s as organizations adopted it for internal documentation, and its most famous example, Wikipedia, launched in January 2001 and had entered the ten most-visited websites in the world by 2007, the same year the Oxford English Dictionary formally added 'wiki' as an English word.