So on the 20th anniversary, OneZero asked the individuals who made Wikipedia what it is today how it all started.
In the 1970s, as the Department of Defense and companies such as IBM continued to develop computer technology and personal computers appeared just over the horizon, a movement emerged to connect the increasingly nimble devices through electronic mail, as well as through the formation of the internet. By the 1980s, Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer in Portland, Oregon, who used to tinker with ham radios and dreamed of connecting computers through them, was looking for ways to innovate how software was written.
Ward Cunningham: We had to change how we thought about writing software. We said we need a new way to write about computer programming because the history was to write about computer programming as if it was mathematics. But when it comes to actually satisfying customers who now have computers on their desks, they couldn’t tell you what they wanted. And the engineers didn’t know.
In the 1990s, Cunningham ran his own computer consulting company, Cunningham & Cunningham, with his wife, Karen. He created something he called the Portland Pattern Repository for fellow programmers to publish software design patterns on his website, C2.com. He wanted to give them a way to collaborate from their homes on the internet.
Ward Cunningham: I was addressing a community that had about 500 people in it. I programmed [the earliest form of what would become a wiki] in a day or two. And when I operated it, the most overwhelming feeling that I had was that it was very quick. I was thinking, “Well, this is going to be important. I have to name it something.” I thought, “Quick Web.” But I knew that in Hawaiian wiki meant quick. And I said Wiki Wiki Web because it had an alliteration and it also would be WWW which is the same as the World Wide Web. I announced it in March of ’95. I said, “Look, I built this system and here’s how to use it.”
Katherine Maher: It was radical in the way that it enabled accessibility to publishing on the web and also enabled collaboration. So you not only didn’t have to learn how to build your own page in HTML, you could do this and you could do it with other people dynamically. It was the first step toward products like Etherpad or Google Docs. It took control over the web and put it into the keyboards of people.
Ward Cunningham: The key thing is you click on a link, and it says, “I don’t have that [information]. Why don’t you put it in?” You’re not just a reader now, you’re an author.