Jimmy Wales

It's quite amusing, actually, because the main reason we launched with UseModWiki is that it was a single Perl script.

So it was really easy for me to install it on the server and just get running.

But it was some guy's hobby project.

It was cool, but it was just a hobby project.

And all the data was stored online.

in flat text files.

So there was no real database behind it.

So to search the site, you basically used grep, which is just like basic Unix utility to like look through all the files.

So that clearly was never going to scale.

But also in the early days, it didn't have real logins.

So you could set your username, but there were no passwords.

So, you know, I might say Bob Smith and then someone else comes along and says, no, I'm Bob Smith.

And they both had it.

Now that never really happened.

We didn't have a problem with it, but it was kind of obvious.

Like you can't grow a big website where everybody can pretend to be everybody.

That's not going to be good for trust and reputation and so forth.

So quickly I had to write a little, you know, login, you know, store people's passwords and things like that.

So you can have unique identities.

And then another example of something, you know, quite, you would have never thought would have been a good idea.