WikiWikiWeb, the world's first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

Ward Cunningham named it after the Honolulu airport shuttle because "wiki wiki" meant "quick" in Hawaiian, and he wanted something faster than email for programmers to share design patterns. The WikiWikiWeb, launched publicly on March 25, 1995, as part of the Portland Pattern Repository, was the world's first wiki: a website where any visitor could edit any page, instantly, without permission or approval. The concept seemed reckless. It changed the internet. Cunningham, an Oregon software developer, had been collecting software design patterns and wanted a collaborative way to document them. Existing tools required either email chains or formal publishing workflows, both too slow for the rapid exchange of ideas he envisioned. He wrote a Perl script that stored pages as flat files and rendered them through a web server. Any visitor could click "edit," change the text, and save it immediately. There was no login, no approval process, and no revision control in the initial version. The WikiWikiWeb attracted a small community of software developers who used it to discuss object-oriented programming patterns. The wiki's conventions evolved organically: CamelCase words automatically became links to new pages, and a culture of collaborative editing emerged where contributors modified each other's writing freely. The lack of gatekeeping was both the wiki's greatest strength and its most controversial feature. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia using wiki software in January 2001, applying Cunningham's concept to the entirety of human knowledge. Wikipedia now contains over 60 million articles in 300 languages, making it the largest reference work in human history. Cunningham's original WikiWikiWeb still exists, a modest collection of programming discussions that accidentally invented the collaborative model underlying one of the most-visited websites on Earth.