On 09/01/07, Frederik Dohr <fdg001(a)gmx.net> wrote: 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.

So you basically only use "wiki(s)" and never use "WikiWikiWeb(s)" at all?

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.)

I was thinking that, then I saw how wikis were actually being used. MediaWiki is a lardarse - power of a tank and durability of a tank, with handling of a tank and mileage of a tank - with silly requirements compared to e.g. my home work intranet wiki, which has ten users and is MoinMoin because that uses flat files rather than MySQL. I wouldn't object to MediaWiki, but I can see a lot to say for the viewpoint that it would be overkill.

My first impression of MediaWiki was that it was too complex for the needs of a medium-sized corporation. I selected MoinMoin because it is also very good and has less infrastructure requirements. Now in other job I'm using MediaWiki and I found out that it is not too complex after all, that it is very mature and, above all, that its extensibility is very good. I'd settle for MediaWiki, even for a 1-person wiki... :-)