What was the name of the first wiki?

The first wiki was WikiWikiWeb. Programmer Ward Cunningham created it in 1994 and launched it publicly on March 25, 1995, through his company’s website, c2.com.

WikiWikiWeb was built to help programmers share ideas about software design patterns. Its defining feature was that visitors could edit pages directly in a web browser, making the site a collaborative knowledge base rather than a collection of fixed documents.

The name was inspired by Honolulu International Airport’s “Wiki Wiki” shuttle bus; “wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian. The project also helped establish the broader term “wiki,” which later became a generic name for editable websites.

Wikipedia is not the first wiki: it launched in 2001 and runs on MediaWiki software. MediaWiki itself is also a later software platform, while Twiki is a separate wiki system. WikiWikiWeb remains historically important as the original implementation and the ancestor of modern collaborative encyclopedias.