Wikis for DUMMIES

Wikis for DUMMIES

The History and Future of Wikis

So far, the idea of wikis has been explained from the general to the specific: from the outside-in, is one way to say it. To better understand the essence of wikis, understanding wikis from the inside-out is also useful. How did the idea originate? What was Ward Cunningham's mission when he developed the wiki concept? What were the false starts? How did the idea of a wiki flower into being? The following sections explore some of the history behind wikis as well as the directions in which they might go.

HyperCard and other wiki precursors

You can find many wiki-like things in the past. For example, Tornado Notes, which became InfoSelect, was a database of free-form notes. And FolioViews made it easy to link between pages. Of all the precursors, HyperCard is probably the most wiki-like thing that existed before wikis. HyperCard was a program created by Bill Atkinson for organizing information; when it came out in 1987, it was distributed with every Macintosh computer sold.

HyperCard used the metaphor of index cards and stacks of cards. On each card, fields of information could be stored, text could be entered, and cards could be linked. Boy, this sounds a lot like a wiki. What wasn't wiki-like about HyperCard was that it was not on the Web. In their first incarnation, HyperCard stacks could be used on a single computer or a bunch of computers sharing a file system where a common stack could be accessed. Still, HyperCard stacks weren't created to allow anyone on the Internet to be able to access them through a browser. This is a big difference from wikis.