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Never having heard of this site: what is/was it?


It's the original wiki, by Ward Cunningham. It has a lot of interesting discussions about software topics. I noticed the site was down because it has a page about the "Cobol Fallacy": that it is a misconception that software would be easier to create in natural language. I wanted to see how the (old) discussion on the topic compares with the present LLM mania/break-through.


There are people saying it was the original wiki, but let me spell out what that actually means.

Before the C2 WikiWikiWeb, few web sites had experimented with making it possible for its users to alter the site's contents. Granted, there were many sites with messaging forums you could post to, and there were places where you could add review or contribute new content entries, but not anything I can remember where you could edit the fabric of the site itself. Sites back then were 'published' by someone who owned them, and any contributions would go through a moderation process before they would be accepted and published, so there was no immediacy to such edits.

The C2 wiki wiki web allowed any user to immediately make an edit or create a new page, and it the site relied upon its persistent history to roll back changes that the community deemed destructive. I remember feeling quite excited by the concept because it was so alien at the time -- that someone was willing to allow anonymous users to put stuff on a site they were ultimately publishing.

The C2 WikiWikiWeb experiment is what ultimately lead to the creation of Wikipedia: an encyclopaedia that could be edited by the end users, hence the name. (In turn, the WikiWikiWeb was named from the Hawaiian word 'wikiwiki' meaning 'quick', which alluded to the lack of any moderation steps in its edits.)


Everything2 was another example of a user-driven site that allowed linking between pages. It's actually still alive today:

https://everything2.com/title/Y+combinator


There's a whole family of sites based on the same codebase of everything2 (which was a cousin of the /. codebase).

https://everything2.com/title/Everything+Engine

Aside from E2, it is likely that PerlMonks is the other still active site - https://www.perlmonks.org ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerlMonks )

The others seem to have fallen into disrepair if they are still up at all.


h2g2.com is a another user-edited encyclopedia site which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike e2. It launched about a year after e2, and about two years before wikipedia.


I thought that the Interpedia concept was closer to an origin of the Wikipedia idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpedia

I remember participating in the discussion.


Among other things, the home of the first Wiki, where people talked about software design and development since the 90s.



Check out the HN submissions from this domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=c2.com


the original wiki


software development wisdom from a time before cookie-cutters




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