
History of Wikipedia - bookofjoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia
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rurban
I was co-maintainer of PhpWiki those times. Jimbo contacted us in 2001 with
this crazy idea, if he could use our software. We were all pretty active
around Ward's wiki and the UseModWiki meta site, with thousands of articles,
and established standards. But Jimbo was a newbie and demanded totally crazy
things from us, which we denied. Like representing a space in a title as _.
You cannot just break the 1:1 relationship of titles to 1:n. Every legal page
can only start with an uppercase char. Totally silly ideas. But we still liked
the crazy idea of these folks. eg one of their first pages was PoliTics,
explaining that this consists of two words, the first meaning Many and the
seconds Blood Sucking Insects.

Eventually they took our diff implementation written by Jeff Dairiki, but
unfortunately not our much better page, template and plugin solutions, which
was extremely safe to use and to extend, not as horrible as their adhoc
written MediaWiki SW. This was more like the Sourceforge SW. Well, another
example of Worse is better.

