doodlewikipad00A SHORT HISTORY OF WIKIS
The word wiki started at an airport in Hawaii.
The programmer who built the first wiki in 1995 named it after the Hawaiian wiki wiki, meaning quick, which he first heard as the name of a shuttle bus between terminals. His idea was a website any reader could edit, quickly.
See the numbers01Principles
02THE SHORT ANSWER
A wiki is a website its readers can change.
The first one set out the rules in a short list.
THE NAME
Hawaiian dictionaries give wikiwiki as a doubling of wiki, fast or speedy. The creator chose it as a more fun alternative to calling his software 'quick web'.
The naming storyOPEN
One founding principle was open: if a page is incomplete or badly organised, any reader can edit it. Editing and writing used the same simple tools.
Wiki by numbersLINKS
Another was incremental: pages can link to pages that have not been written yet. Writing WikiWikiWeb with run-together capitals made it a link automatically.
The design ideas03WIKI BY THE NUMBERS
Pick a figure to see how far wikis have grown. The bar gives a rough sense of scale, from hundreds to tens of millions.
Figures from the first wiki's own history page and English Wikipedia's About and Statistics pages, read in October 2026. Live counts change daily.
04TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
One figure on how often pages change,
one on how many languages now have a wiki encyclopedia.
≈ 1.38bn
Page edits since it was set up
English Wikipedia's statistics page counted 1,376,016,233 page edits since it began on 15 January 2001, an average of about 20.7 edits for every page.
EDITS · ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA
300+
Separate Wikipedia wikis
Wikipedia describes itself as a multilingual project of more than 300 separate wikis for almost as many languages, all built on the same idea of pages anyone can edit.
LANGUAGES · WIKIPEDIA
The first wiki's history page notes a claim that wiki ideas trace back further, to the ZOG database system first built at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1972.
05FOUR FOUNDING IDEAS
The creator later reconstructed the principles behind the first release. Four of them still describe almost every wiki.
Easier to use than abuse. A wiki that reinvents complicated markup has lost the path.
If a page is incomplete or poorly organised, any reader can edit it as they see fit.
Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet.
Activity on the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor.
06THE NAMING STORY
Asked by a dictionary etymologist in 2003, the creator explained that wiki wiki was the first Hawaiian term he learned: an airport counter agent told him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals. He thought WikiWikiWeb was more fun to say than quick web.
He named the program itself 'wiki' in lower case, following Unix convention, and the short name appeared in the site's web address, which encouraged everyone else to shorten it too. He said he preferred the Hawaiian pronunciation, wee-kee, with wick-ey an acceptable alternative.
07Questions
It comes from Hawaiian. The Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian dictionary gives wikiwiki as a reduplication of wiki, meaning fast or speedy.
The WikiWikiWeb began on 25 March 1995, as a supplement to a website for software design patterns. Its creator had written similar programs earlier, but they did not run on the web and were not called wiki.
Its creator said he preferred the Hawaiian pronunciation, wee-kee, rhyming with leaky, though he was happy for wick-ey to be an accepted alternative.
No. Wikipedia began on 15 January 2001, nearly six years after the original WikiWikiWeb. It now runs more than 300 language editions.
On the first wiki, words written with run-together capitals were recognised automatically as links to a page of that name. That is why the name was spelled WikiWikiWeb.
08Sources
ABOUT THIS NAME
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