The Wiki Story

Even the licensing models are similar: Wikipedia, the largest wiki site in the world with 250,000 files and counting, is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, a literary analog to the GNU GPL, the license backing Linux.

Perhaps the biggest similarity, however, is the loose knit nature of the wiki publishing model. Like open source tools such as Bugzilla and CVS, wiki publishing starts from the root philosophy that the more authors you invite into the editing process, the better your chances are at plowing through the barriers that tend to limit or delay that process.

"Nothing in Wiki is ever formal," says Sunir Shah, founder of Meatball Wiki, a technical site that focuses mainly on topics related to Java development. "If you have people who are just going to get in your way all the time, you can't get anything done. Everybody has the same power."

History

As noted, the wiki publishing model dates back to 1995, the year Ward Cunningham, an object oriented software developer, chose to augment a personal website dedicated to the topic of "pattern" languages in software design by adding an "edit this page" link.

"It was based on an idea that I had done originally in Hypercard," says Cunningham, noting the old hypertext prototype program of the late 1980s. "But I found that it was hard to get Hypercard into a multi-user setup."

Looking for a better foundation, Cunningham noted that the World Wide Web, the then-new hypertext-publishing platform growing by leaps and bounds, allowed users to upload pages without running through a server login. Most sites never take advantage of the capability, Cunningham says, because the Web's creator, British scientist Tim Berners Lee, had hoped to make it a WYSIWIG feature but never got around to modifying the HTTP specifications to allow for it. In the rush to take advantage of the Web, many of the earliest browsers -- Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer -- solidified around a download-only viewing model.

"Nobody ever implemented a put command," says Cunningham. "Because Tim [Berners Lee] was slow in offering a WYSIWYG version, I developed this crude hack of a Wiki markup language. Take a way the ["edit this page"] click and you basically have Tim's WYSIWYG vision."

Though just a hack, Wiki proved popular enough that readers of Cunningham's website began to appropriate the code for their own sites. In the spirit of Berners Lee and other past software innovators, Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft, saw no reason to stand in the way of proliferation and innovation. If anything, he takes pride in it.

"I think one of the reasons it spread so quickly was so many people said 'I can do that better than Ward did,'" he says with a laugh. " It's gotten to the point where I couldn't pretty up my wiki, because it wouldn't be fair to the other sites that have. I almost feel a historical obligation to keep it the way it is."

Same but...Different

The term "WikiWiki" is Hawaiian for "very fast." Often shortened to "wiki" when used in the context of open publishing, the technical definition is a harder to nail down. Wikis now come in all shapes and sizes. As for the underlying source code, it can vary radically. So much so that site maintainers often compete to see who can strip down

wiki-enabling commands to their bare essence. Currently, the record is a 220-character version written in the PERL scripting language.

"When Ward created, he was trying to make something very, very simple," notes Shah. "That's the thing most people miss: With a wiki, all you have is a buffer that anybody can edit and you have all these links."

In other words, wiki isn't a tool. It's a relationship with the reader: You can edit but so too can your fellow readers. So edit wisely. Though many wikis attract vandalism, the model allows for easy reversion to past, un-vandalized versions.

This quality puts wiki publishing on league with CVS, the free software content versioning system employed by many project administrators. Like CVS, wiki assumes that contributors, on the whole, make their contributions in good faith, while at the same time leaving a line of defense against those who don't make contributions in good faith.

Like CVS, the wiki editing process depends heavily on social cooperation. Reject a well-intended contribution and you run the risk of chasing off the very people who can make the writing process go smoothly. Though some wiki sites enforce rules on content style, length, and relevance, Shah says his own site, Meatball Wiki, prefers to avoid anything that would impose too much control. The end result: Development-related discussions tend to veer toward traditional flamewar topics but don't get bogged down in them.

Shah says the editing style the Meatball Wiki community has adopted is dialectic. Writers append their thoughts to previous writers' words rather than rewriting those words. While not ever wiki works this way, the fact that Meatball Wiki has adopted this policy is a sign that wikis, like open source programs, tend to evolve with the communities that create them. A Jainist, Shah says Meatball Wiki has had an effect on his own personal faith. Just as open source software has shown that cooperative development can flourish within a competitive economy, wiki publishing shows that the traditional impetus of authorship -- the joy of seeing one's own words on the page -- can sometimes take a back seat to community edification.

"Every working philosophy comes down to the same thing: Unmotivated action," says Shah. "I find wiki to be very inspirational in that regard. There’s one thing that's true about editing a wiki. You think you're starting off trying to learn facts about a basic topic, but if you stay there long enough, it'll change your life."

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