In the months before I made wiki, we had been having an argument. I think Kent Beck and I were on one side. People who had a lot of faith in the prev… - Ward Cunningham

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In the months before I made wiki, we had been having an argument. I think Kent Beck and I were on one side. People who had a lot of faith in the prevailing dogma of software engineering were on the other side. We said, "Collective code ownership is good." They said, "That's ridiculous. You'll never get responsibility. You'll never get quality if you don't have responsibility. And the only way you'll get responsibility is ownership. You have to pin the bugs back on somebody if you want them to ever rise above producing bugs." And I said, "Well that's wrong."

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About Ward Cunningham

Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born 26 May 1949) is an American computer programmer, most famous as the inventor of the first wiki, which was first called WikiWikiWeb (now called WardsWiki), and one of the pioneers of software design patterns and Extreme Programming.

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Also Known As

Alternative Names: Howard Cunningham Howard G. Cunningham

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Additional quotes by Ward Cunningham

Often, the program ends up amazing. You'll say, "This is beautifully architected." Well, where did that architecture come from? In this case, architecture means the systematic way we deal with diverse requirements. Architecture allows us, when we go to do work we need to do on the program, to find where things go. It is a system that was worked into the program by all the little decisions we made — little decisions that were right, and little decisions that were wrong and corrected. In a sense we get the architecture without really trying. All the decisions in the context of the other decisions simply gel into an architecture.

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.

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Putting a new feature into a program is important, but refactoring so new features can be added in the future is equally important. The ability to do things in the future is something that I consider suppleness, like clay your hands that accepts your expression. Programs and documents get brittle very quickly. Wiki imagines a more dynamic environment where we accept change...

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