{"id":1476,"date":"2010-10-15T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2015-03-22T18:28:26","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T01:28:26","slug":"where-the-word-wiki-comes-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2010\/10\/where-the-word-wiki-comes-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where the Word \u201cWiki\u201d Comes From"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"wiki<\/a>

The Famous Wiki Wiki Shuttle Bus at Honolulu Airport<\/p><\/div>\n

Today I found out<\/a> where the word “wiki” comes from.<\/p>\n

Howard G. Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki which was launched in 1995 called WikiWikiWeb, upon his first visit to Hawaii was informed by an airport employee that he needed to take the wiki wiki bus between the air port\u2019s terminals.\u00a0 Not understanding what the person was telling him, he inquired further and found out \u201cwiki\u201d means \u201cquick\u201d in Hawaiian; by repeating the word, it gives additional emphasis and thus means \u201cvery quick\u201d.<\/p>\n

Later, Cunningham was looking for a suitable name for his new web platform. He wanted something that was unique, as he wasn\u2019t copying any existing medium, so something simple like how email was named after \u201cmail\u201d wouldn\u2019t work.\u00a0\u00a0 He eventually settled on wanting to call it something to the effect of \u201cquick web\u201d, modeling after Microsoft\u2019s \u201cquick basic\u201d name.\u00a0 But he didn\u2019t like the sound of that, so substituted \u201cquick\u201d with the Hawaiian, \u201cwiki wiki\u201d, using the doubled form as it seemed to fit; \u201c\u2026doublings in my application are formatting clues: double carriage return = new paragraph; double single quote = italic; double capitalized word = hyperlink.\u201d\u00a0 The program was also extremely quick, so the \u201cvery quick\u201d doubling worked in that sense as well.<\/p>\n

The shorter version of the name, calling a wiki just \u201cwiki\u201d instead of \u201cWiki Wiki\u201d came about because Cunningham\u2019s first implementation of WikiWikiWeb named the original cgi script \u201cwiki\u201d; all lower case and abbreviated in the standard Unix fashion.\u00a0 Thus, the first wiki url was http:\/\/c2.com\/cgi\/wiki.\u00a0 People latched on to this and simply called it a \u201cwiki\u201d instead of a\u201cWiki Wiki\u201d.<\/p>\n

It should also be noted that the proper pronunciation of \u201cwiki\u201d is actually \u201cwe-key\u201d, rather than the way most today pronounced it, \u201cwick-ee\u201d. However, given the popularity of the mispronunciation of the word, Cunningham and others have long since stopped trying to correct people on the matter.<\/p>\n

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