 Wickey's collaborative software, software, I made it on the web and allowed people to come to a website and create something. I think what's really turned out is that people discovered that they can create something with other people that they don't even know, but they come to trust and they make something that surprises them, all of them, in terms of its value. HyperCard was kind of a drawing program where you could draw a bunch of pages, a bunch of screens, and then cause one screen to link to another, and I, well nobody knew what HyperTex was then, so it was kind of hard to figure out, well what are you supposed to do with this? And I like that idea of having something that kind of challenges you, and I like to figure out what to do with things, so I thought, well, I'll make a bunch of cards about how ideas move through my company. An interesting thing about it was that it assumed that if you wanted to make a link, if you wanted a button on one card to go to another card, you would know what other card, and it would already exist. And when I was asking people to tell me about how ideas move through the company, they were always talking about moving to a company someplace that there wasn't a card for. So I just made it so that you could type the name of something, and when you press the button to go to the link, if it wasn't there, it made the card. And that making it on demand, let you move around to HyperText, and when you got to the edge of it, it would just push that edge out farther. And so I could tackle a subject that's like unimaginably large, every idea in my whole company. But people who knew about ideas would just follow it around, they'd go from card to card until they went to someplace they got to the edge, but they went to the edge because they knew about that edge. They wanted to see what I said about it, and what my program said is, I don't know about this, tell me something about this. And they just loved to write. In fact, in HyperCard, people would come sit at my desk, and they'd want a demo of HyperCard, and I'd show them this program, and they wouldn't leave. And I had a pet theory that engineers wouldn't use an idea unless they'd seen it work before, that they were basically conservative, and so ideas were slow to be absorbed. And so I was interested in how ideas moved around in communities, and that notion was more important than any particular HyperText, but we had held some conferences, we call it the pattern languages of programming conference, or pattern languages of programs, and had a hundred people come out to the University of Illinois. This was at the summer of 1994, and talked about how we needed to write about computer programs in a different way so that we captured these ideas and why people decided an idea was good or bad. And then my friends said, oh, let me show you this new thing called the World Wide Web, University of Illinois, right? They created the first graphical browser, and they showed this to me, and they said, Ward, we think you need to make a HyperText pattern repository. Well, of course I thought, you know, I'd done this before with the HyperCard, and I just needed to move it over to the web, and then I wouldn't have people sitting around my desk because it was the web, it was international, so it solved that problem. And could I do it? Could I get forms? And I had to make up this idea of markup because I had to account for the fact that I didn't have the buttons that I had in HyperCard, you know. It's a different system, but I made markup, and then I tried it, and I sat there, and I started typing stuff in, and it was as much fun as I remember. I knew what it was fun to do it in HyperCard. I knew people wouldn't leave my desk, but I could sit there on the web, and I said, I've got it. This is the feeling. You know, I pay attention to what it feels like to use computer programs, and it felt right. So I knew it was important. I knew it would serve the purpose, which I wanted to talk about ideas again in computer programming. So the audience I was imagining was people just like me. People were very surprised, or in fact sometimes people would, you know, send me email and say, well, I don't want to mention it, but you've got a terrible bug in your system that lets people write anything. Or they would say, you've got a mistake on this page, and they would send me an email telling me what the mistake was and what I should have said instead. And to encourage them, I would just take their email and paste it into the wiki, and then send them a pointer to the page. It says, well, I took the liberty of taking your message and putting it in the wiki for you, but you could have done it yourself. And I babysat the community that way for, you know, a couple years. The other thing is because I didn't have any notion, you know, I encourage people not to sign their works. I thought, you know, your words, your ideas are a gift to the community, and you shouldn't be claiming credit for it just because then nobody else is going to improve it. They're going to feel it's yours. So I discouraged that, but I used that a lot myself. I did probably 80% of my editing anonymously, and that just let people feel that, well, there's a large community here. There's all this back and forth, and it has a consistency because I wrote a lot of it. But that's a bootstrapping problem. I had to make it feel like there was a community to attract a community, and people poured in. The other things is I invited people with the most recognizable names. And so when they showed up and wrote something, you know, they only had to write a page or two because somebody else who's less well known would say, oh, he's here. I should be here, you know, so there's kind of stroked vanity. Well, you know, I might have been wrong on some of this stuff. I mean, sometimes people really feel if they aren't going to get credit for what they write, they don't want to write. But what I was encouraging is people to recognize that they're gifting their words. They're, you know, it's just an idea. Ideas are cheap. And when people would write something and come back later and find that their words had improved, you know, I mean, that's pretty exciting. You say, boy, overnight this got better. You know, who made this better? And it's almost mystery because they didn't sign it either. You know, it's like, oh, the Wiki made this better. And it was, well, you're not used to things getting better on their own. A classic thing on computer communication boards and that at the time was you would write something and somebody would spot a spelling error. And so they would say, you spelled this and it's spelled, they spelled that, you know, because the only place you could write it is at the bottom. You could add, but you couldn't change. And so, you know, you write something and you come back and all you find is tedious complaining about what you said. Now, in my system, you know, you write a spelling error, somebody just fixes it. And you come back and you don't even notice it was there. But you find this one sentence that somebody added that really gets it, something you were trying to say. And so, you get the positive stands out and the negative is just erased. Now, the nice thing there is if somebody comes along in the meantime and is reading who knows less than you, they might find your partial answer valuable. So this is this idea that you start, every thought is kind of a seed and it just grows and grows and grows. And that's, it's been used very effectively on Wikipedia, but it was very important on my Wiki, which was really about changing the way people talk about computer programs because there wasn't anything other than people's direct experience to fall back on. So as people would write about their experience programming, people would read it and it's the first time they had ever read somebody talking about, say, you know, being afraid that they wouldn't be able to get the program done and how that changed the decisions they made out of fear or how they found a way to work with somebody else and find the thing that is acceptable to both. There are lots of aspects. We were very interested in how computer programs could form in an emergent way where you didn't have a master plan for the computer program. You say, well, we have a general idea of what we want to do and you know some of it and I know some of it and Joe knows some of it, but we're all going to work together and just let the program grow. Well, you know, to talk about something like that which was unheard of at the time in computer programming in an environment, in a text system, in a discussion board that had the same property, well, it was a demonstration of the very concept that we were trying to explore for computer programming and it is true in computer programming. We see it all the time and it's accepted now, but it was considered foolishness when we started and now it's recognized as really the only way to make a really great program. It was my first Hawaiian word that I learned as they were trying to direct me to the wiki-wiki bus between terminals and wiki is a Hawaiian word that means quick and so wiki-wiki means very quick so it's the very quick web. It's always been technically called wiki-wiki web, but when I wrote the script, the CGI script that made it work, it was a Unix system and of course on Unix you always use abbreviations in a lower case, so I called it wiki.cgi in Unix and so most people didn't want to bother to say wiki-wiki web, they just called it wiki and that's fine with me, so it's like saying, oh, here's a system called quick. If you need more minds, if one person knows everything and they can kind of sit back and really think deeply, they can see the whole program and just write it down or write a poem. Poetry is one of those things that's personal enough that if you write a poem a day after 30 years you're a great poet and it's probably a solo thing, but computer programs and encyclopedias are of a scale that you have to make it a collaborative effort and then to make it good, to make it read like it was from a single mind is the challenge and that's where people have to learn how to compliment each other or I like to say play to each other's strengths where you take what you're good at and I take what I'm good at and we find a way to fit it together to make like we were one Superman and that happens, it's not that hard. There is a style of working together where we'll agree ahead of time that you'll do this part and I'll do this part and if you don't hold up your end to the deal then you know I'm gonna take you to court or something like that, that's this contracting style stuff and I think that's better than competition but it's only works for things where you know where you're going in the end, you know what the whole is gonna be and that's a useful way to work but that because people who were funding computer programs they thought well that's how we wanted to work this way, if I'm gonna pay you for six months to write a computer program I wanna know what you're gonna do and you're gonna do and you're gonna do and it was the master plan and it turns out that that uses a small percentage of the capability of the computer, the computer is much better if you let it become what it really wants to be or the best that you can make it and that's has this sort of sense of faith, you know you have to believe that it's gonna come out even though you can't say what it is, I mean if somebody decided what the pages of Wikipedia were gonna be at the beginning of the project they would have made a list of important sounding pages and there would have been all kinds of stuff that people love in there that they wouldn't have thought of you know I got this you know kinda grow from the center out kinda dynamic right for a hypertext document on the web and that's been a model of sharing and it involves you can learn enough about each other to develop this trust relationship but there's a couple of things that Wikipedia did write that didn't even occur to me and you know for example getting the licensing right I was careless about the licensing and I think that saying you know this has to be licensed this way here's the ownership, here's the guarantees going forward that's important and I just wasn't interested in that stuff so I didn't do that right can you explain what that means? well the that the openness you know I was open but I was open but there was no guarantee that it was open there was no agreement when somebody submitted there was an expectation but it wasn't written down and in fact I think when I finally did write it down I said well I own it you know you have the right to use it but you can't keep it and that's not really open but you know the I think Jimmy Whales' relationship to with Richard Stallman and you know got that right the other thing that that I just didn't think about or I thought would be too hard was being international the fact that because it's licensed to be reused of course that means the content is free to go into other languages and the fact that people might read one and want to write in their own language and that international aspect is profound in terms of actually having an opportunity to in some sense bring the world together it's the Wikipedia is probably one of the strongest forces in computers for creating peace in the world you know in that sense it's fabulous you know this understanding to just believe that it could be done in every language when you find yourself reading you know an encyclopedia that is about the things you care about because it was written by people just like you talking about what they care about and that caring you know becomes so important to you you trust this well the fact that that same sort of interaction is happening in a lot of different cultures now we could talk about edict wars and stuff like that but what really is happening is there are people who are moving back and forth between different languages people who are fortunate enough to know and understand multiple cultures can in this world just carry little bits of culture back and forth and when I read something even in the English Wikipedia and I see some mention of you know where the airplane was really invented or something like that it's broad in a sense that because people who have a worldly view unfortunately not very worldly but have a worldly view have shared their worldly view and part of it is because they got involved with their language so English is a big one but it's even more important if you have more obscure languages it makes you part of one world one world of ideas and that idea that every language is important just says every person is important too