Who invented the wiki markup Wikipedia uses?

This question is more involved than would at first seem. To give Ward Cunningham credit for the wiki markup Wikipedia uses might be like giving Tim Berners Lee credit for inventing XHTML.

For the original wiki, Cunningham used what is today called "camel case." To make a link to the article on hydrogen peroxide, you would write HydrogenPeroxide. If you just want a link to hydrogen, as is needed on Wikipedia, that's a problem. Wikipedia thus uses "free linking," in which you would write [[hydrogen peroxide]] rather than HydrogenPeroxide to make the link.

Linking is probably not the only way that Ward's original markup differs from the markup now used in Wikipedia. The New York Times mentions a wiki markup in which words enclosed by asterisks become boldface in the saved article. That does not work on Wikipedia.

To fully answer your question, it is necessary to figure out how rigidly Cunningham made the rules for wiki markups and whether or not Cunningham proposed any significant portion of the markup now used on Wikipedia.

According to Citizendium, Clifford Adams is the one who made the change from CamelCase linking to linking with square brackets. The square brackets for links is what comes closest to being standard in wikis. Everything else is about equally divided among the various wikis, and since MediaWiki is the most prominent of them all, its markup tends to be regarded as the standard and the original wiki markup when it is in fact neither.

Who Invented The Internet Wikipedia

Ward Cunningham invented wiki markup. The specific Wikimedia software that Wikipedia uses has been developed by numerous people over the past 10 years. This includes Brion Vibber and a team of German guys.

Whomever gets the final credit for the development should probably watch themselves:

http://favstar.fm/users/SpectreCollie/status/26559...

Ole Ward Cunningham.

Ward Cunningham invented it.

Ward Cunningham