# WikiWikiWeb

WikiWikiWeb (also *c2 Wiki* or just *Wiki*) was the first ever created wiki (user editable) website, created in 1995 in Perl by Ward Cunningham. It was focused on software engineering and computer technology in general but included a plethora of discussion and pages touching other topics as well, e.g. politics, humor or nerd and hacker culture. The principles on which it stood, most importantly allowing users to edit its the highly hyperlinked pages, largely influenced thousands of subsequently emerging sites which made use of the same concepts -- these sites are now collectively called wikis, most famous of which is Wikipedia. The style of WikiWikiWeb was partly an inspiration for our LRS wiki too.

The project quite impressively spawned over 36000 pages (http://c2.com/cgi/wikiPages). Since 2014 the wiki can no longer be edited due to vandalism, but it's still online. It was originally available at http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki, now at http://wiki.c2.com/ (sadly now requires JavaScript, WTF how is this a hacker site???).

The site's engine was kind of suckless/KISS, even Wikipedia looks bloated compared to it. It was pure unformatted HTML that used a very clever system of hyperlinks between articles: any CamelCase multiword in the text was interpreted as a link to an article, so for example the word `SoftwareDevelopment` was automatically a link to a page called *Software Development*. This presented a slight issue e.g. for single-word topics but the creativity required for overcoming the obstacle was part of the fun, for example the article on C was called `CeeLanguage`.

Overall the site was also substantially different from Wikipedia and allowed informal comments, jokes and subjective opinions right in the text. It was pretty entertaining to read. There's a lot of old hacker wisdom to be found there. On the other hand it was a bit retarded too though, a bit like hacker news of its time, except a tiny bit less stupid maybe. The people were not as much focused on pure hacking but rather on "software engineering", i.e. manipulating and "managing" people, they were obsessed with OOP patterns and things like that.

There are other wikis that work in similar spirit, e.g. CommunityWiki (https://communitywiki.org, a wiki "about communities"), MeatBallWiki (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/) or EmacsWiki.

## Interesting Pages

These are some interesting pages found on the Wiki.

{ NOTE: To see all pages in given category go to the category page and CLICK THE PAGE TITLE. ~drummyfish }

- **CategoryCategory**: List of categories of pages.
- **CategoryHumor**: Humorous pages.
- **ComputerGame**
- **ExtinctionOfHumanity**: Discussing end of humanity and a possible collapse.
- **GameOfChess**: About chess.
- **LanguageGotchas**
- **WeirdErrorMessages**
- **WikiWikiWebFaq**
- **WithinTwentyYears**: Mostly pre-2005 predictions about what technology would be like in 20 years, a lot of hits and misses.
- **WikiHistory**

## See Also

- Jargon File
- Wikipedia