WikiWiki

The term WikiWiki is a type of hypertext document or the software used to write it that enables collaborative editing. "wiki wiki" means "quick" in the Hawaiian language; "wee kee wee kee".

Often called "wiki" for short, the collaborative software application enables web documents to be authored collectively using a simple markup scheme and without the content being reviewed prior to its acceptance. The resulting collaborative hypertext document, also called either "wiki" or "WikiWikiWeb," is typically produced by a community of users. Wikis are sometimes recognizable by their use of CamelCase; this turns the phrase into an automatic link. The world's largest WikiWiki is Wikipedia whose goal was to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch.

The original WikiWikiWeb was established by Ward Cunningham, who invented and named the Wiki concept, and produced the first implementation of a WikiWiki server. Some people maintain that only Ward's wiki should be called Wiki (upper case) or the WikiWikiWeb. Ward's Wiki remains one of the most popular Wiki sites. It is a mark of wiki culture that no two wiki clones are alike. It is often debatable whether a site is a wiki or not, and few people expend much effort trying to define or preserve the difference.

There are "guided bus tours" taking you to various wiki sites. At each site there is a "bus stop" giving some info about that wiki. You can "get off the bus" to stay longer at that wiki, or move on to the next. To start, go to the "bus stop" of Wikipedia: Wikipedia:TourBusStop.

You can search the page titles of various wikis at once using MetaWiki.

Characteristics of functioning wikis are that they have good software support, and an active user community. In this they have similarities with web logs (blogs), but wikis allow mass multi-user collaboration. All users can edit most articles.

Wiki software originated in the design pattern community: the PortlandPatternRepository was the first wiki.