Clergyman's

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

The idea of where does an idea come from and who should get credit for it is pretty soft. But I think people are pretty good at dealing with that softness and recognizing contribution when they know the people involved. With collective ownership, we create a social situation where you can get to know a person by how they spin their intellect into source code statements.
- Ward Cunningham

I'm not a fan of classification. It's very difficult to come up with a classification scheme that's useful when what you're most interested in is things that don't fit in, things that you didn't expect. But some people decided that every page should carry classification. They came up with a scheme, based on page names, to establish a classification structure for a wiki. And these people who care about classification maintain it.
- Ward Cunningham

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

People can and do trust works produced by people they don’t know. The real world is still trying to figure out how Wikipedia works. A fantastic resource. Open source is produced by people that you can’t track down, but you can trust it in very deep ways. People can trust works by people they don’t know in this low communication cost environment.
- Ward Cunningham

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

When people work code they can often see things I set out to do that they wouldn't notice otherwise. And there are no obligations to say, ""Ward you're brilliant,"" but sometimes they say, ""Ward you're brilliant."" And that strokes my ego. Pride of ownership? You bet.
- Ward Cunningham

The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.
- Ward Cunningham

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.
- Ward Cunningham

I think there's a compelling nature about talking. People like to talk. In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us. Second, and perhaps most important, I wanted people who wouldn't normally author to find it comfortable authoring, so that there stood a chance of us discovering the structure of what they had to say.
- Ward Cunningham