Some of you may be as interested (obsessed, some might call it) as I am with Wikileaks. I won't get into the politics, personalities, legalities, international brouhahas, and counterattacks here, just the name. I never even thought about about what a
Wiki was until I received a regular email from
Dr. Goodword about the word.
"This word originated in the name of the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, created by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Mr. Cunningham's intention was to write software that would allow websites to be created in the quickest possible way. Rather than call his invention QuickWeb, he used the Hawaiian word for "quick", wiki, after riding a wiki-wiki bus at the Honolulu airport. As in most languages, repeating this Hawaiian word intensifies its meaning, hence wiki wiki means "really quick", just like quick quick in English. Still, the quickest way to say "quick" in Hawaiian is with one wiki, so half the original term was rubbed away by subsequent history."
He lists the following recently derived words: "wikiholic, wikihow, wikiinfo, wikicomic, wiktionary, wikiculture, wikidata, wikifiddler. It also sports a new verb, wikify, whose chances of survival are much greater, given the fact that it has already produced a noun, wikification."
For a more extensive discussion about the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, see Wikipedia. It was built using Hypercard, one of my all time favorite pre-web programs.
