The wiki got its name from a Honolulu airport shuttle bus
Ward Cunningham needed a name for his editable website and remembered an airport counter worker in Honolulu telling him to catch the Wiki Wiki Shuttle between terminals. Wiki is Hawaiian for quick. Using it, he later explained, spared him from calling his invention quick-web, and the word ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Cunningham began building WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and put it online at the domain c2.com on 25 March 1995. He had been inspired by Apple's HyperCard, which let people build linked stacks of virtual cards but only for one user at a time. Drawing on ideas from the hypertext pioneer Vannevar Bush, he wanted many people to comment on and change each other's writing, partly to document programming patterns, and he described the result as the simplest online database that could possibly work.
Early wikis made links in an odd way. Page names were squashed together in camel case, with each word capitalised and spaces removed, and any such phrase in the text automatically became a link. That forced strange spellings, since a single-word title needed an extra capital, as in WiKi. In February 2001 an engine called UseModWiki introduced free links, wrapping ordinary words in double square brackets, and many later engines copied it. Links to pages that did not yet exist appeared in a different colour, an open invitation to write them.
Wikipedia launched the same year, in January 2001, and entered the top ten websites in 2007. It is really hundreds of separate wikis, one per language, and the English edition held 7,244,181 articles by September 2026. On 15 March 2007 the word wiki joined the online Oxford English Dictionary, as companies and universities adopted the tools for documentation and group work.
Cunningham's own view kept shifting. By 2014 he argued that no single site is a wiki; each is only an instance of wiki, with content that can be hosted and edited in several places at once.
Source: Wiki
