Original Wiki Platform

The wiki has helped fundamentally transform how we think of knowledge.

Ask someone a question, and one of the first things they might do is go to Wikipedia. From there, they will follow links to other pages in what is now the largest repository of human knowledge ever created.

This access to knowledge has had a profound impact on our opportunity to learn. Previously, knowledge was stored away in large libraries, often in distant places, accessible to relatively few.

But even more profoundly important is how this knowledge is created. By being community-sourced, it was no longer dependent on a relatively small group of academic authorities, enabling a much broader collection of knowledge. It has become the largest single repository of human knowledge ever created.

The original wiki platform, created by Ward Cunningham, allowed this community authoring to happen. And this wiki platform, in multiple variants, is now used by companies and communities in thousands of deployments around the world as repositories of knowledge.

But the original wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, did not set out to be a communal knowledge base. Instead, Ward sought to develop a way for software programmers to share new ideas and programming practices that utilize the concept of Pattern Languages.

This platform was instrumental in the launch of the movement that was to become Agile.