wiki
wiki
Hawaiian
“A Hawaiian word for "quick" became everyone's encyclopedia.”
In Hawaiian, wiki means quick or fast. Wiki wiki means very quick. When you arrive at Honolulu airport, the Wiki Wiki Shuttle takes you between terminals—it's just the fast bus.
In 1994, programmer Ward Cunningham was looking for a name for his new software—a website that anyone could edit, quickly. He remembered that Wiki Wiki Shuttle from a trip to Hawaii. He liked that wiki was easier to say than "quick-web" and chose it as the name for his WikiWikiWeb.
The technology spread. In 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger used Cunningham's wiki software to create a free encyclopedia that anyone could edit. They called it Wikipedia. Within a decade, it became one of the most visited websites in the world—a repository of human knowledge built by volunteers.
The Hawaiian language, spoken by fewer than 24,000 native speakers, gave the internet one of its most important words. Wiki now means any collaborative website, and the concept has transformed how we create and share information.
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Today
Wiki represents a radical idea: that knowledge can be collectively created and freely shared. It's also a reminder that innovation often comes from unexpected places—a shuttle bus name remembered by a programmer.
The Hawaiian language, nearly destroyed by colonization, contributed a word that defines how billions of people learn. Every time someone looks something up on Wikipedia, they're using a Hawaiian word.
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