It’s a little-known fact that part of Wikipedia’s name comes from a bus in Hawaii. In 1995, six years before the famous online encyclopedia launched, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham was at Honolulu International Airport on his first visit to the islands. He was in the middle of developing a new kind of website to help software designers collaborate, one that users themselves could rapidly edit from a web browser. It was a striking innovation at the time. But what to call it?
“I wanted an unusual word to name for what was an unusual technology,” Cunningham told a curious lexicographer in 2003. “I learned the word wiki … when I was directed to the airport shuttle, called the Wiki Wiki Bus.”
Wiki means quick, and Hawaiian words are doubled for emphasis: the very quick bus. With that, Cunningham’s software had the distinctive sound he was looking for: WikiWikiWeb.
Wikipedia, whose development Cunningham wasn’t involved with, is one among countless websites based on his work. The second half of its name comes from the word encyclopedia, with pedia being the Greek term for knowledge: “quick knowledge.” Yet now the site is so successful that its fame has eclipsed its origins—along with the fact that a chance visit to an island gifted the digital age one of its most iconic terms.
I love delving into the origins of new words—especially around technology. In a digital age, technology can feel like a natural order of things, arising for its own reasons. Yet every technology is embedded in a particular history and moment. For me, etymology emphasizes the contingency of things I might otherwise take for granted. Without a sense of these all-too-human stories, I’m unable to see our creations for what they really are: marvelous, imperfect extensions of human will, enmeshed within all manner of biases and unintended consequences.
I give talks about technology to teenagers, and often use Wikipedia as a prompt for discussion. Let’s find and improve an article to make Wikipedia better, I suggest, and in the process, think about what “better” means. My audience’s reaction is almost always the same. What do I mean by improving an article? Aren’t they all written by experts? No, I say. That’s the whole point of a wiki: The users themselves write it, which means no page is ever the last word. There are no final answers, and no ownership beyond the community itself.
Some contributors to Ward Cunningham’s original wiki are less than complimentary towards Wikipedia precisely because they see it betraying this intention. By virtue of its success, they argue, Wikipedia encourages an illusion of impartiality and permanence. Its pages can become “self-contained, self-appointed ‘truths’” that close down debate—or restrict it to a self-selected editorial caste.
A larger momentum lies behind such worries: the passage of time itself. None of my teenage audience remembers a time before Wikipedia, and Cunningham’s original website is older than every one of them. Like much of the software and hardware in their lives, Wikipedia is simply a part of the landscape—something people inhabit, adapting themselves to its contours.
Digital technology has an uneasy relationship with time. Old formats and platforms fall into disuse fast; newer is by definition better, faster, brighter. Yet decades-old decisions continue to have an influence. If, for example, you want to understand the design of a computer mouse, you need to dive back into a 1965 NASA paper exploring different possible control methods—including a kind of treadle moved with the knees, a "Grafacon" tablet and stylus, a light pen, a joystick. In doing this, you’ll find yourself transported to a time when it was by no means obvious how people might best interact with a computer, or even what interacting with a computer meant. Sample quote from the original paper: “Although the knee control was only primitively developed at the time it was tested, it ranked high in both speed and accuracy, and seems very promising.”
Who would imagine using their knees to control a computer today in parallel to t