UseMod

UseMod is a program that lets you run a special kind of website: one whose pages any visitor is allowed to change directly in the browser. Such websites are called wikis. On a wiki, there’s an edit button beneath every piece of text, and the change is immediately visible to everyone. UseMod was released in the year 2000 by the American Clifford Adams and was free for anyone to use. It is famous for a single reason: Wikipedia started on this software in January 2001. Today UseMod is used practically nowhere anymore, but it is considered a piece of internet history.

The software Wikipedia started on

Wikipedia today is one of the most-visited websites in the world. Its first few months, however, ran on a program that a single person had written and that fit into a single file. This shows something important about the early internet: big projects often started with very simple tools. Only when the number of articles grew did Wikipedia switch, in 2002, to a purpose-built piece of software that is known today as MediaWiki.

UseMod was also important because it had almost no barriers to entry. You didn’t need an expensive server or a database, just ordinary web space. This meant that schools, clubs, or individual enthusiasts could also set up a wiki. In the early 2000s, hundreds of small topic-specific wikis sprang up this way.

Some of today’s Wikipedia conventions stem directly from this era. The idea of creating links by putting a word in double square brackets was already common in UseMod. The “Recent Changes” page, where you can see all the edits made by the community, also already existed there.

Text files instead of a database

Technically, UseMod is a single script written in the Perl programming language. A script is a program that runs on the server as soon as someone loads the page. The server then sends finished text to the visitor’s browser. To the user, this looks like a perfectly normal website.

The most striking difference from today’s software lies in how it stores data. Modern wikis store their content in a database, that is, in a dedicated program that organizes large amounts of data and keeps it searchable. UseMod dispenses with this entirely. Every wiki page is simply a text file on the server’s hard drive. You can picture this as a filing cabinet full of slips of paper rather than an electronic card index.

This makes setup extremely simple, but it has clear limits. With thousands of pages and many simultaneous visitors, searching through text files becomes slow. This is precisely why Wikipedia had to switch software. The text itself is entered in a simplified notation known as wikitext. Instead of complicated commands, you write, for example, asterisks to create a bulleted list.

Where the name still turns up today

In everyday life, you virtually never encounter UseMod anymore. Anyone wanting to set up a wiki today uses MediaWiki, DokuWiki, or a ready-made platform on the web. UseMod is barely maintained anymore and would not be a sensible choice for a larger project.

Nevertheless, the name comes up regularly whenever the history of Wikipedia is discussed. In anniversary articles or documentaries it appears as a footnote: the software of the very first few months. In discussions about open-source software, too, UseMod serves as an example of how a small free project can enable something very large.

For you, the term is mainly useful as an aid for placing things in context. Whenever UseMod is mentioned somewhere, it’s about the early days of the participatory internet, roughly between 2000 and 2003. UseMod should not be confused with Usenet, an even older discussion network. The names are similar, but the thing behind them is something completely different.