# Ward Cunningham

- A [[person]].
- [[twitter]] https://twitter.com/wardcunningham
- The [[OG]]. 
- The inventor of the [[wiki]].
- See also: [[c2]].

## [[social-knowledge-graphs-discussion]]

- [[Wiki]]
  - Had experience with Smalltalk, amassed over several months of undirected exploration
  - People asked for the gist of Smalltalk to learn it over two days. How to condense months of learning in a format that makes that possible?
  - The initial pattern repository came from that (influenced by [[christopher alexander]]).
- "Made this thing over a weekend because people were sending me things by email that didn't render right" -- called it wiki because it meant "fast".
  - "If I make this stupid simple" -- people won't think I tried hard, but they will have the tools to "fix it".
- [[Tended]] to the wiki a few hours a day -- in the time between "proper work". But that tending paid off.
  - [[digital garden]]
- For long, people could have thrashed but didn't. Then someone did, and people just tended to it.
- The environment that resulted was very [[creative]]. Lots of vocabulary was coined right there.
- When Wikipedia came along, it did the right things:
  - They made it in every language
  - They were bold (paraphrase)
- Spinning off wikis out of wikis
  - Wiki on wiki (meta)
  - Religion wiki
- Taking pages and refactoring, cross-linking -- that's the core of federated wiki.
- In a federated wiki, queries propagate -- pages include a history on which wikis have hosted the wiki previously. If a page vanishes, it can be found in a previous version.
- "When you're talking about yourself, talk of yourself as we"
- Google-like analytics were interesting
  - Tried not to pay attention.
  - Bone (sp?) dialog: you talk to the center of the room, not to any particular person. It's good for sharing, giving.
- Some people wanted to put graphs in wiki
- Federated wiki has a few thousand sites on it, 25-30 get daily updates and host vibrant communities and might be interested in your project.
  - Links are the title of the page
  - But if you retrieve a page from some other wiki, it fans out/ripples
  - The sites you pull from become part of your neighborhood
  - When you search, you can choose to "pull" pages into your sites
    - [[curational event]]
  - People might turn out to maintain several sites, specialized on topics
- If you go to your unicycle page, it will mention there are N pages about unicycle in your neighborhood 
- http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/wiki-as-knowledge-graph.html


[//begin]: # "Autogenerated link references for markdown compatibility"
[person]: person "Person"
[twitter]: twitter "Twitter"
[wiki]: wiki "Wiki"
[c2]: c2 "C2"
[social-knowledge-graphs-discussion]: social-knowledge-graphs-discussion "Social Knowledge Graphs Discussion"
[christopher-alexander]: christopher-alexander "Christopher Alexander"
[digital-garden]: digital-garden "Digital Garden"
[//end]: # "Autogenerated link references"