Interview with Ward Cunningham
In some random reading I came across AboutWikis which has an Interview with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the Wiki concept as we know it today.
The following link (on MSDN .. weird) How did you come up with the idea for the Wiki? contains the mediaplayer file of the interview. Both of these articles are a couple of years old. Interestingly this concept was invented in 1995 !
The four points I picked up from the Interview:
- They were trying to achieve more than a static list of items/information
- He said he was lazy – He did not want to update the material
- Leap of Faith (Allowing others to edit or vandelise)
- Decentralisation of decision making (Trend in Organisations anyway)
Ward did write a book called “The Wiki Way” written (or published) in 2001.
Wiki has been around for a while, but interestingly has only started to appear “en mass” over the last 6 -> 12 months as documentation on open source projects. This is not to say that Wiki’s have not been around longer, but it seems like the understanding of their use is more widespread.