Wikis For Dummies
Chapter One
Understanding Wikis: From Ward's
Brain to Your Browser
In This Chapter
* Finding your way to wikis
* Understanding what makes a wiki a wiki
* Comparing wikis with blogs and other Web sites
* Examining the history and future of wikis
* How to start using wikis
When Ward Cunningham started programming the first wiki engine
in 1994 and then released it on the Internet in 1995, he set forth a
simple set of rules for creating Web sites that pushed all the technical gobbledygook
into the background and made creating and sharing content as
easy as possible.
Ward's vision was simple: Create the simplest possible online database that
could work. And his attitude was generous; he put the idea out there to let
the world run with it. The results were incredible. Ward's inventiveness and
leadership had been long established by the role he played in senior engineering
jobs, promoting design patterns, and helping develop the concept of
Extreme Programming. That a novel idea like the wi ... read full excerpt from Wikis For Dummies ebook
