Ward Cunningham Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

View all Ward Cunningham Quotes
Wiki helped define the category of social software.

Ward Cunningham
What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

Ward Cunningham
Why have a locked wiki when you can instead just post static Web pages?

Ward Cunningham
What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before.

Ward Cunningham
When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.

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

Ward Cunningham
Global collaboration is something that Wiki mastered in a small way and here we can master it in a big way.

Ward Cunningham
People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing — as long as they are allowed to.

Ward Cunningham
I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.

Ward Cunningham
The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work. Whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community. It's all just people communicating.

Ward Cunningham
We erased a problem by not trying to erase the problem, by saying, "This is in the nature of what we do." It's really weird that it could be that simple.

Ward Cunningham
Accept that you've got a common goal that we're all working towards and that we're working towards the same goal. In other words, align and self-organize.

Ward Cunningham
With wiki, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to trust them. In 1995, it was a safer environment, don't know if I could have launched wiki today.

Ward Cunningham
There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.

Ward Cunningham
A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.

Ward Cunningham
There is an art to knowing where things should be checked and making sure that the program fails fast if you make a mistake. That kind of choosing is part of the art of simplification.

Ward Cunningham
Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.

Ward 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.

Ward Cunningham
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.

Ward Cunningham