The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system (information system) of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text (writing), images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, English engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. He was later joined by Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed using "HyperText ... to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and released that web in December.

"The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project." If two projects are independently created, rather than have a central figure make the changes, the two bodies of information could form into one cohesive piece of work.