Wiki

A wiki is a body of interlinked pages editable in place. Ward Cunningham built the first in 1995 and named it after the Hawaiian wiki wiki, meaning quick — the point being that editing should be as frictionless as reading.

Two conventions define the form. Free linking: any page may link to any other by name, and a link to a page that does not exist yet is legitimate — it marks something worth writing. Incremental improvement: a page is never finished, and a partial page is better than none.

Those conventions produce a distinctive result. A wiki does not have to be planned. It grows by following links, and its structure emerges from which pages accumulate connections. That makes it the natural form for reference material whose scope is not known in advance.

The trade is the same as its virtue: without curation a wiki accumulates stubs, duplicates under near-identical names, and pages that have quietly gone out of date. The maintenance activities that matter are merging duplicates, keeping naming consistent so links resolve, and pruning what has rotted. See Naming and Documentation Rot.

Personal wikis have become common as a private reference — the same mechanics, one author, and no obligation to be encyclopaedic.