Ward+Cunningham

Ward Cunningham was the founder of the first wiki site on March 25, 1995 for the PortlandPatternRepository. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called "Wiki Wiki" Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web." "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of **wiki wiki** (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for "what I know is", which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.

According to Cunningham, the idea of 'Wiki' can be traced back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s.