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