Editing Wiki software (section)

== History ==
{{main|History of wikis}}

The first generally recognized "wiki" application, [[WikiWikiWeb]], was created by American computer programmer [[Ward Cunningham]], and launched on c2.com in 1995.<ref>''The Wiki Way. Quick collaboration on the Web'', Addison-Wesley (April 2001) {{ISBN|0-201-71499-X}}</ref> "WikiWikiWeb" was also the name of the wiki that ran on the software, and in the first years of wikis' existence there was no great distinction made between the contents of wikis and the software they ran on, possibly because almost every wiki ran on its own customized software.

Wiki software originated from older [[version control]] systems used for documentation and software in the 1980s.  By the mid-1990s these generally had [[web browser]] interfaces.  However, they lacked the ability to easily create links between internal pages without writing [[HTML]] code.  For WikiWikiWeb, the [[CamelCase]] naming convention was used to indicate internal links, without requiring HTML code.

By the time [[MediaWiki]] appeared, this convention had been largely abandoned in favor of explicitly marking links in edited [[source code]] with double square brackets.  Page names thus did not interrupt the flow of English and could follow the standard English capitalization convention.  [[Case sensitivity|Case insensitivity]] on the first letter but not subsequent letters supported standard English capitalization conventions and let writers author their pages in ordinary English, with the linking of particular words and phrases afterward.  This proved to be the critical change that allowed ordinary authors of English to write wiki pages, and non-technical users to read them.  This policy was extended to other natural languages, avoiding the use of unusual-looking text or awkward capitalization that violates the language's own rules.

Over the next 10 years, many more [[List of wiki software|wiki applications]] were written, in a variety of [[programming language]]s. After 2005, there began to be a move toward increasing consolidation and standardization: many less-popular wiki applications were gradually abandoned, and fewer new applications were created. Relatively few of the wiki engines currently in use were created after 2006.

Some [[content management system]]s, such as [[Microsoft SharePoint]], have also adopted wiki-like functionality.