Thanks, David. So you basically only use "wiki(s)" and never use "WikiWikiWeb(s)" at all?
Oh, by the way: Your response reminded me that even my professor - who is supposed to know better, and otherwise quite competent - uses the term "a wikipedia" sometimes, which I think is quite odd...
-- F.
----- Original Message ----- From: David Gerard Date: 2007-01-09 13:02
On 09/01/07, Frederik Dohr fdg001@gmx.net wrote:
Am I wrong in my understanding of this - or is there simply no clear consensus on that yet?
I treat "wiki" as the generic and "Wikipedia" as Wikipedia. I'm a volunteer press contact for the Wikimedia Foundation, so get a reasonable number of opportunities to use soundbites implying this usage.
The term "A wikipedia" being applied to anything that isn't a Wikimedia Foundation wiki (or a test Wikipedia expressly working toward being WMF-hosted) is a bad idea and tends to get a polite but slightly aggrieved email from the Foundation pointing out it's a trademark and asking for a rephrase, so that should work with time.
I'm not so sure how to recover the term "wiki" - it's definitely being used as a casual English language conversational term for the English Wikipedia. But hopefully with workplace wikis coming into fashion, the term will become generic. (Even if a lot of them will be MediaWiki installations, whether or not it's gross overkill for ten users. But MoinMoin, UseMod, Trac and the Microsoft thing are all used on intranets quite a bit; MediaWiki hardly has a monopoly.)
- d.
Oh, and I do try to point out we didn't invent it, or even close, and give due credit to Ward Cunningham!
- d.