
WikiWikiWeb - tosh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
======
dognotdog
I guess I'm one of those old people now who actually does remember reading
about software patterns on the c2.com wiki, and being amazed by it, before
Wikipedia even existed :)

~~~
klipt
Some of their article titles are still hilarious, like
[http://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie](http://wiki.c2.com/?SmugLispWeenie)

~~~
DonHopkins
I appreciate asking questions like "WhatsaControllerAnyway?"

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190321044743/http://wiki.c2.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190321044743/http://wiki.c2.com/?WhatsaControllerAnyway)

And covering both sides of issues like:

[http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWeLoveLisp](http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWeLoveLisp)

[http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWeHateLisp](http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWeHateLisp)

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cribbles
> On February 1, 2015 Cunningham announced that the Wiki had been rewritten as
> a single-page application and migrated to the new Federated Wiki.[6]

I still don't understand the motivation behind this. The "new" SPA is
bizarrely unperformant and inelegant. Unnecessary too, since the wiki just
serves a bunch of unstyled HTML boilerplate. What was the idea here?

~~~
jolmg
The point wasn't a new front-end. From this Wired article[1]:

> But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. "I always felt bad
> that I owned all those pages," he says. The central idea of a wiki – whether
> it's driving Wikipedia or C2 – is that anyone can add or edit a page, but
> those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls.
> Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central
> control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.

So, in short, the point is decentralization, so the Wiki belongs to the people
and not be under any one entity's control.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2012/07/wiki-
inventor/](https://www.wired.com/2012/07/wiki-inventor/)

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oftenwrong
One thing I liked was the use of WikiCase. Just type the title of another
page, and it makes it a link. No markup to learn. Very approachable. There are
a number of major downsides, though, so I am glad most modern wikis use a
markup-based system.

[http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiCase](http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiCase)

[http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiNameDisadvantages](http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiNameDisadvantages)

[http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiNameAdvantages](http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiNameAdvantages)

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wainstead
But the tiny learning curve made them so accessible. Back then you could
introduce a wiki for your team and start churning out project documentation
right in a meeting. Where the wikis back then didn't hold up was for long term
documentation sites. If your wiki would only have a short shelf life it was an
awesome collaboration tool.

~~~
thom
Where did you feel wikis fell down in the long term? I would quite happily
ditch Slack for something like a live collaborative Google Docs but simpler
and with wiki style linking, if the tooling for search and discovery was good.

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djsumdog
I'm surprised how many people today, even people my age, don't realize that
anyone can edit Wikipedia, or that there's much more valuable information (at
least for controversial articles) located in the Talk page.

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dboreham
You can edit it, but your edit will be quickly reverted.

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metalchianti
Not always but definitely true for anything politically controversial.

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trynewideas
It's true for anything with an obsessive self-declared owner on a subject.
Political articles attract those like flies, but you'd be surprised at all the
other places they nest.

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tropo
Everything is political to somebody.

I see that the bird lovers have finally conquered the Feral_cat page on
wikipedia. That took some doing. The obsessed cat crazies used to really guard
that page.

A decade or two ago, wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had to step in to handle
pedophilia-related pages that were being guarded by sympathetic editors.

Most companies will guard pages related to them. Whole countries will even do
this.

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INTPenis
The history of wikis[1] page says that the wiki concept was introduced to the
general public by Wikipedia.

Of course this is a one sided perspective. Growing up in Sweden I was
introduced to the concept by susning.nu. Which is also mentioned on that same
page.

For a while it was a concept to look up things on susning. Just like googling.

"Skaffa en susning" is an old swedish saying that means "get a clue", "educate
yourself".

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wikis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wikis)

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agumonkey
Thanks to Ward and his friends, a source of inspiration like few.

I loved the site so much I used to spam it on every blog as a 'personal
website' to promote it ..

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sunir
My favourite online community. It taught me a lot about what can and cannot
work with online social organizations. It is amazing how much can work with so
little just through sheer common spirit, focus, and camaraderie.

~~~
amitp
It was a great online community!

It was weird how shared content (what we think of as a wiki today) and
discussion ("talk" pages on wikipedia) were all mixed together, and it somehow
worked. The only Wiki I use these days that still does this is EmacsWiki.
Google Wave felt like this in reverse, starting with discussion as default but
you could edit everything into a document.

Also: hi Sunir!

~~~
sunir
Hey Amit!

I still think the best I have ever written or contributed was from editing
discussions over time into content. Slowly.

I still use those skills. I just edited a Slack Q&A into a checklist on
launching partnership integrations. The difference is I don’t write in the
“WikiNow” any more because no one understands it except what someone once
pejoratively called “wiki monks”. :)

For reference: [http://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com/2019/07/11/the-
compl...](http://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com/2019/07/11/the-complete-
integrated-partnership-launch-checklist/)

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zwieback
I remember two great things from my time on c2:

\- Vigorous and fruitful discussion of current programming and SW engineering
trends

\- TopMind!

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jpindar
Ah, the TVtropes of software development.

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girst
Does anyone know if the original (pre-2015) source code of the wiki software
is available anywhere?

It once was at [1], but that link has long gone. [2] still links to it.

[1]:
[http://c2.com/cgi/hp?WikiInHyperPerl](http://c2.com/cgi/hp?WikiInHyperPerl)
[2]: [http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiBase](http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiBase)

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tawayroy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_On-
line_Dictionary_of_Com...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_On-
line_Dictionary_of_Computing) also allowed suggestions from users for changes

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new299
So, are wikis currently out of fashion in Software development/internal
documentation?

I don’t see many wikis that are really suitable for this, and none that have
widespread adoption.

Does everybody just throw stuff in Slack and hope they can find it with the
search function?

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kristofferR
I'd say tools like Notion [1] have brought wikis more into fashion for
internal documentation than ever.

[1] [https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

~~~
new299
Interesting, but I’ve never heard of it and didn’t come across it when I was
looking for wiki/Evernote alternatives a few months back.

I guess I’ll have to look into it. Couldn’t quite see how it differs from
Evernote (which in my few has a lot of features missing which teams might
need).

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tosh
Lisp: [http://wiki.c2.com/?LispLanguage](http://wiki.c2.com/?LispLanguage)

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calvinmorrison
goto: [http://wiki.c2.com](http://wiki.c2.com)

it's like [http://harmful.cat-v.org](http://harmful.cat-v.org) but saner

~~~
chacha2
I hate this trend on sites that show you buttons when you highlight text. I
use highlighting to follow the text and it interrupts my line of site every
time those buttons pop up.

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calvinmorrison
Install NoScript, never look back.

~~~
cesarb
Unfortunately, the site in question requires JS; without JS, it displays
nothing but a blank page with a spinner. It doesn't even have a <noscript>
element.

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dredmorbius
Stylus can often undo that by styling the popup elements as "display: none
!important;"

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cesarb
That would still result in a blank page. There's no content at all in that
page, everything is generated by JS.

~~~
dredmorbius
I was addressing the "show you buttons when you highlight text" issue.

Enabling JS _and_ 'none' styling the offending elements via CSS ... solves at
least one problem.

