What is WikiWikiWeb?

WikiWikiWeb, or simply WikiWiki or Wiki (with a capital 'W'), is the first ever wiki, written in Perl. It accompanies the Portland Pattern Repository (PPR) on c2.com and is located at c2.com/cgi/wiki. The term wiki that is used to refer to other similar groups of modifiable Web pages, e.g. Wikipedia, came from this original wiki.

In order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier, Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on his company Cunningham & Cunningham's Internet domain c2.com on Mrach 25, 1995. Cunningham named WikiWikiWeb that way because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast.

Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb".

The name Ward's Wiki (or WardsWiki) is also used for WikiWikiWeb, but has many times negative connotations due to its suggestion that Ward Cunningham maintains strict ownership and control over the entire community, a role which he actively avoids. Other names have been suggested to try to avoid ambiguity with the generic concept of a wiki, and to reflect the growing amount of non-pattern related content. The term C2 Wiki is also used.

Read more at Wikipedia.