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WikiWikiWeb

WikiWikiWeb (also c2 Wiki or just Wiki) was the first ever created wiki (user editable) website, created in 1995 in Perl by Ward Cunningham. It was focused on software engineering and computer technology in general but included a lot of discussion and pages touching on other topics, e.g. those of politics, humor or nerd and hacker culture. The principles on which this site worked, i.e. allowing users to edit its pages, greatly influenced a lot of sites that came after that are now generally called wikis, of which most famous is Wikipedia. The style of WikiWikiWeb was partly an inspiration for our LRS wiki.

It had over 36000 pages (http://c2.com/cgi/wikiPages). Since 2014 the wiki can no longer be edited due to vandalism, but it's still online. It was originally available at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki, now at http://wiki.c2.com/ (sadly now requires JavaScript, WTF how is this a hacker site???).

The site's engine was kind of suckless/KISS, even Wikipedia looks bloated compared to it. It was pure unformatted HTML that used a very clever system of hyperlinks between articles: any CamelCase multiword in the text was interpreted as a link to an article, so for example the word SoftwareDevelopment was automatically a link to a page called Software Development. This presented a slight issue e.g. for single-word topics but the creativity required for overcoming the obstacle was part of the fun, for example the article on C was called CeeLanguage.

Overall the site was also very different from Wikipedia and allowed informal comments, jokes and subjective opinions in the text. It was pretty entertaining to read. There's a lot of old hacker wisdom to be found there.

There are other wikis that work in similar spirit, e.g. CommunityWiki (https://communitywiki.org, a wiki "about communities"), MeatBallWiki (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/) or EmacsWiki.

Interesting Pages

These are some interesting pages found on the Wiki.

{ NOTE: To see all pages in given category go to the category page and CLICK THE PAGE TITLE. ~drummyfish }

  • CategoryCategory: List of categories of pages.
  • CategoryHumor: Humorous pages.
  • ComputerGame
  • ExtinctionOfHumanity: Discussing end of humanity and a possible collapse.
  • GameOfChess: About chess.
  • LanguageGotchas
  • WeirdErrorMessages
  • WikiWikiWebFaq
  • WithinTwentyYears: Mostly pre-2005 predictions about what technology would be like in 20 years, a lot of hits and misses.
  • WikiHistory

See Also