Once a name or monument transcends what it originally named and is used by reference to describe similar things elsewhere, there is a tendency to add the definite article -- the Earth, the Sun, the Sphinx, the Oracle, the Colosseum. I do see people running wikis of any sort on their own or their company site, with a comment that they have 'set up their own wikipedia'. This would be consistent with calling the original Project 'the' Wikipedia.
Yes, it's somewhat archaic if not self-important. WP has become the largest human collaboration of all time, so it's not for lack of transcendence... but it doesn't sound right to me. [On the other hand, I'm having a hard time thinking of a social or practical movement whose name doesn't have a 'the' in it.]
SJ
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Deliriumdelirium@hackish.org wrote:
Samuel Klein wrote:
Wikipedia does not take an article, nor does Wikimedia.
When combined with an adjective modifying the project name, or a common noun modified by the name, the compound noun does take an article.
"Wikimedia is a non-profit charitable corporation." is correct; so are "The English Wikipedia", "the Wikipedia cabal", "the print Wikipedia 'Wikipedia:' namespace pages", and "the Wikimedia Foundation".
A bit late on this, but I notice that [[en:Encyclopædia Britannica]] consistently refers to that encyclopedia as "the Britannica". Given that, I can hardly fault the average non-Wikipedian for being confused as to why it's not, in a parallel way, "the Wikipedia"; I imagine Britannica's dominance has conditioned a good many people to think that "the _Encyclopedianame_" is the proper way to refer to encyclopedias.
I suspect this is some sort of archaic grammar being held over in Britannica's case?
-Mark
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