On 09/05/07, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia has a domineering culture, and because it was the first project, many of the members there are in the habit of calling wikipedia simply "wiki". Notice how people refer to en.wikibooks to describe the english wikibooks, but nearly all wikimedians use the term "enwiki" to describe wikipedia. Doesnt help that this ambiguity is embedded in the software. The fact that the news media has picked up on wikipedian's jargon and refers to it as simply "wiki" is not so much a surprise as an obvious result.
I'm really not convinced this is the case. "Wiki" as a proper noun for Wikipedia (English only or not) is very much an *external* thing; I see it a lot in emails written to us by outsiders, but rarely see it used internally by anyone actually involved with the projects. Indeed, it's something of a shibboleth...
(caveat - there's also "the wiki", which you get pretty often on and around enwp but is clearly a context-sensitive phrase; "the wiki [which we are discussing]", and could be used in reference to anything. enwiki and enwp are used interchangeably now, and are very much internal only - I really doubt any external use is based on our use of those terms)
"Wiki" as a proper noun is people encountering the almost unescapable behemoth that is Wikipedia, stripping off the bit that seems generic (-pedia) and assuming the rest is "their name". Because wikis are generally pretty low-profile and obscure, we're usually the first one most people encounter, and so they don't realise it's as much a generic term as -pedia is.
(Note the converse also happens - "a wikipedia" used to describe any wiki)