Wiki is a term that came into wide use in the mid-1990s, though it was used long before that as a colloquialism. A colloquialism is usually used by English speakers in a certain geographic area or English speakers of a certain dialect. We will examine the meaning of the word wiki, where it came from and some examples of its use in sentences.
Wiki refers to an internet database or website that may be edited by the community of users. The first use of the term wiki as a computer term was the Wiki Wiki Web, the first website that could be edited by users. The Wiki Wiki Web was founded in order to make it easier for programmers to share software ideas. The inventor was Howard G. Cunningham, who found the word wiki on a visit to Hawaii when he was advised to take the wiki wiki bus between airport terminals. Wiki is a Hawaiian word that means quick. Wiki Wiki Web was the forerunner of various websites still in use today, such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikileaks. Wiki may be used as a stand-alone word or in compound words.
Examples
The TV celebrity was refusing to make his returns public, and it appears WikiLeaks sought a copy to publish in order to demonstrate it totally wasn’t rooting against Assange’s arch-nemesis, Hillary Clinton, and singing from the same hymn sheet as Trump and Moscow. (The Register)
This past summer she had asked Pearson to gather a “Wiki Army” and get people together to edit/update pages. Sparks shares the same anger towards underrepresentation of women on Wikipedia and together, they are trying to plan a course of action. (The Valley Advocate)
The wiki page then reads: “No other media reported the breaking of the minutes silence and in the audible broadcast by BBC Radio Scotland it appeared that all fans observed the minutes silence.” (The Scottish Sun)