WikiWikiWeb was the name of the first ever wiki site, and it was founded in 1994 as an automated supplement to the Portland Pattern Repository. The site was immediately popular within the programmer community, largely due to the newness of the Internet and a good slate of invited authors. The site was, and remains, dedicated to people, projects and design patterns (Design patterns are general solutions to common problems in software design).

Ward Cunningham created the site and the Wiki Wiki Web machinery that operates it. He chose the Hawaiian phrase wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for quick and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web. An early page, WikiWiki Hyper Card, traces wiki ideas back to a Hyper Card stack he wrote in the late '80s.

See also one of these links:

if this page is going to stay, someone needs to explain to phrases like pattern repository and how things like pattern repositories relate to things like the Wikipedia and Local wikis. - some n00b

  • It's a pattern repository, which stores patterns found in pattern languages (e.g. speakable languages, computer languages, social interactions). -bl As per http://c2.com/ppr/about/patterns.html:

Patterns are the recurring solutions to the problems of design. People learn patterns by seeing them and recall them when need be without a lot of effort. Patterns link together in the mind so that one pattern leads to another and another until familiar problems are solved. That is, patterns form languages, not unlike natural languages, within which the human mind can assemble correct and infinitely varied statements from a small number of elements.

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