Howard G. Cunningham Quotes

United States, Programmer
May 26, 1949

Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of the software consultancy he started with his wife Karen, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He has authored a book about wikis, titled The Wiki Way, and also invented Framework for Integrated Tests. He was a keynote speaker at the first three instances of the WikiSym conference series on wiki research and practice as well as a keynote speaker at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017.

Wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Control
- Users
- Wiki
What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before.

Howard G. Cunningham
- People
- Access
- Wiki

When I was at Tek, I was frustrated that computer hardware was being improved faster than computer software. I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change as it was used. That’s how wiki came about.

Howard G. Cunningham
Wiki pages are very much free form. Across the whole wiki there is a hypertext structure, but on a given page, within the versatility of your command of your natural language, you can say whatever needs to be said.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Said
- Need
- Page
Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties.

Howard G. Cunningham
The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Inspired
- Process
- Create
Wiki is like a leaky bucket of information. It's losing information every day. But more information is coming in, so the net is positive. Even if it can lose things, wiki always has more to say than it did the day before.

Howard G. Cunningham
Many people have experience with a program that's gotten out of control. They have an idea. They think they know what they want to do. But when they go to put the idea in, the idea is forgotten by the time they've figured out how to put it in.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Experience
- Idea
- Put It

I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Decision
- Situation
- Make
A wiki is always in the process of being organized. But for every hour spent organizing, two more hours are spent adding new material. So the status quo for a wiki is always partially organized.

Howard G. Cunningham
- Process
- Organized
- Wiki