Ideas and Inventions
Cunningham is well known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. The most famous among these are the wiki (the Hawaiian word for "quick") and many ideas in the field of software design patterns. He owns the company Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., a small consultancy that has specialized in object-oriented programming.
When asked in a 2006 interview with internetnews.com whether he considered patenting the wiki concept, he explained that he thought the idea "just sounded like something that no one would want to pay money for."
Cunningham is interested in tracking the number and location of wiki page edits as a sociological experiment and may even consider the degradation of a wiki page as part of its process to stability. "There are those who give and those who take. You can tell by reading what they write."
According to Steven McGeady, Cunningham advised him in the early 1980s, "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer." McGeady dubbed this Cunningham's Law. Although Cunningham was referring to interactions on Usenet, the law has been used to describe how Wikipedia works.
Read more about this topic: Ward Cunningham
Famous quotes containing the words ideas and, ideas and/or inventions:
“A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;Mnor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)