Good observation. I've been using Wikipedia and Wikipedias. The
reasoning for this is because Wikipedia is a brand, rather than a
concept (that is, the name is more similar to "Yahoo" than it is to
"weblog").
One problem with using lower case "wikipedia" is that people tend to
think of it as a generic concept, such that we have seen folks
erroneously use the term "wikipedia" or "Wikipedia." For an example,
see:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-May/000213.html
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 23:58:21 -0400, Chitu Okoli
<cokoli(a)jmsb.concordia.ca> wrote:
By the way, off topic grammatical note on
"Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs.
"wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for
capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other
languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are
many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one
such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For
instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but
the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun
should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring
to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small
letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to
any of various language wikipedias (e.g.
de.wikipedia.org and
zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big
mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be
www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at
en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest
and the most visited).
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Andrew Lih
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