Photo: Wikipedia
The work “Wiki” is a Hawaiian word meaning “Quick”. The first ever wiki website was launched by Ward Cunningham called “WikiWikiWeb” on March 25, 1995. When he was visiting Hawaii, a Honolulu International Airport counter employee informed him that he needed to take the “Wiki Wiki” bus to go to another terminal. As he did not understand the meaning of the word “Wiki” he asked and learned that it means quick. Repeating the word two times means “very quick”. Later Cunningham was looking for a name for his new web platform where users would be able to edit the contents. As the program was extremely quick, he named it “WikiWikiWeb“, very quick web.
You can still access the website. The url is: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. The word “wiki” from the url became widely popular over time.
Here is an interview of Ward Cunningham on his invention of Wiki..
Wikipedia, the most famous wiki, was launched on January 15, 2001. Today it has 4,561,347 content articles, 33,371,751 pages and 21,827,138 registered users in total and became a very important source of information.