After Ward Cunningham created the first wiki website WikiWikiWeb, there were various "WikiWikiClones" that implemented the functions and design of WikiWikiWeb's engine ("WikiBase"), mainly written in Perl. Peter Merel developed CVWiki which was an early WikiWikiClone released partially under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and Markus Denker then developed AtisWiki which was released under the GNU General Public License and based on CVWiki.
In the 1990s, Clifford Adams initiated the Usenet Moderation project that would allow users to share rating, editing, and eventually summary/change information about Usenet postings. It was replaced by the concept of wikis in 1999, and the development of UseModWiki started on October 11 as a simplified fork of AtisWiki. From version 0.4 ("WikiFour") in November 1999, more functions and improvements were introduced to UseModWiki. In 2000, the second UseModWiki website MeatballWiki was launched and hosted in usemod.com, along with the official website of UseModWiki.
In 2001, as Adams was both of the UseModWiki developer and a Wikipedian, he brought many improvements for the usages of an encyclopedia to v0.91 and v0.92, especially "free links" that uses double square-brackets (e.g., [[Wikipedia]]) as an option along with camel case for linking to another page. In September 2003, after two years of development, the release of version 1.0 introduced many new features including CSS, RSS, file uploads, UTF-8, and more. Only bug fixing versions were released since that, and Markus Lude took over the project of UseModWiki from Adams in July 2007. The latest version was released in December 2017.

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