Wiki Madness

Almost everybody knows what a wiki is thanks to Huntsvillian Jimmy Wales and the site that he founded, Wikipedia. What is not so widely known is the story behind the invention of the wiki.

Ward Cunningham invented the wiki in 1994. It was an experimental site designed to see whether a community of people could collaborate to build a collection of hyperlinked pages in an organic fashion. It was wildly successful beyond any expectations that he had. Here’s how it works.

There is a button on every page that allows the contents of that page to be edited. There is some convention for encoding links to other pages, often the use of what is referred to as camel case where the first letter of each word is capitalized. For example, AnotherWikiPage might be a link to a page titled AnotherWikiPage. If the page doesn’t exist already, it will have some visual indication of that fact, often a question mark that is a hyperlink that will create a new page of that name when clicked. It is actually much simpler in practice than it sounds when you explain it.

Ward’s original Wiki was created primarily for the discussion of design patterns in programming. The idea of the wiki caught on quickly and soon there were many other people implementing there own spins on it.

One of the most interesting spin offs is a project called TiddlyWiki that implements a personal wiki. It is written in Javascript and runs in a web page. Each “page” is called a tiddler and they are displayed on a single “river” of tiddlers that unfolds on the web page as you click on links or search for content.

You can create as many of these TiddlyWikis as you’d like kind of like notebooks. Each one lives in its own file on your computer. You can share a TiddlyWiki with someone else by including the file as an attachment to an email or you can put it on a memory stick and carry it with you between computers.

What kinds of things can you use it for? I use it to for a work journal. At the beginning of the day I create a new journal entry tiddler. I keep a running narrative of what I’m doing on my project in it. If I need to look up what I did or when I did it, I just search my wiki for my notes.

The applications for it are as numerous as your imagination can come up with. You could use it to take notes for a class. You could use it to collect recipes and search for them based on their ingredients. You could create tiddlers instead of writing everything down on sticky notes. You can’t search sticky notes automatically with a computer.

It is a wonderful tool. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s as revolutionary as the spreadsheet or word processor.  You should definitely try it. Check out the getting started videos on the web site.


Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.