In his words, WikiWiki is a set of informational Web pages 'that are open and free for anyone to edit as they wish. They're stored in a database and managed using some Perl CGI scripts. Cunningham's idea was to create a Web site on which anybody could create and change Web pages via an ordinary Web browser. Such an idea seems chaotic at first, but the system works amazingly well. Letting anyone edit everything is such a wacky, no, Wiki idea that it has to have profound impact on the very nature of the community that uses WikiWiki.
Every page becomes community property, open to anyone for anything.
Clearly, WikiWiki needed to be modified in order to fit into the corporate culture. The need for authentication may tell us more about corporate life than about collaboration. It still gives people the opportunity to edit every web page. It still turns a website into community property. But it does so with more respect for both authors and authority.